Voices that Inspire

What inspires you from WFSU Public Media? Here's this week's Voices That Inspire. Kimbo Thomas, youth program manager for the City of Telehancey, and also involved with community engagement as well, but I specifically run a program called Telehancey Engaged and meaningful productivity for opportunity youth known as Tempo. Tempo is to reach out to as many possible 16 or 24-year-olds in this city who drop out of school who are walking our streets and are not engaged into employment and educational opportunities. And they're a subject to criminal activity, drug abuse, domestic violence, and poverty. We start out with a survey just to kind of get a brief assessment of where they are. And then we find out of course their high school drop-outs, many of them 19th and 10th grade high school drop-outs. And I connect them with trying to get their GED at least through a doling community and they've been a great partner. We also want to talk about what happens after your GED. What can we do to put you in a position where you can make potentially a living way to job with that, be going to library technical college, with that BTC2FAMU, TCC2FSU. So we're also pushing the envelope a little bit more by not just getting a GED because I want them to do as I say, I want them to do more than flip burgers and dip fries. There is a population of young adults out there that need support. And they need support in a way that maybe the city went to this program has never addressed because kind of out of sight, out of mind kind of thing. So I want that it be a connectivity. I want that it be a consciousness about disconnected youth in the city of Tallahassee, all of the state of Florida, all of the nation. Kimber Thomas, youth program manager for the city of Tallahassee and I am the manager of the Tempo Program in Community Outreach. You're listening to Voices That Inspire.