Grantee Spotlight Archive

Keeping Young People Alive, Free and Motivated to Succeed

Dr. Joseph Marshall was a public school teacher and administrator for 25 years, during which time he became well acquainted with the limits schools face in reaching out to young people with troubled pasts and uncertain futures.

For the past 20 years, Dr. Marshall’s Omega Boys Club/Street Soldiers has served as a redemptive resource and a place of hope, potential and growth for students whose experience in the world has led them to distrust and scorn education and intelligence.

“These young people are buying into the street culture, and without getting past that culture and all of the issues that come with it, you can’t teach them anything,” Marshall says. “They have let their academic pilot light go out. Our job is getting that light lit again, developing the natural scholar which we believe exists in all students.”

The Omega Boys Club/Street Soldiers mission is to keep young people alive and free – unharmed by violence and free from incarceration – and to provide youth with opportunities and support to build positive lives for themselves and move into contributing roles in society. Dr. Marshall’s unique prescription for accomplishing this mission involves intensive education and college preparation training, relevant connections to real-life culture and situations, and extraordinarily high expectations.

Omega Boys Club started when Dr. Marshall and Jack Jacqua, a school counselor, decided to do something about the high numbers of their promising students who were ending up selling or using drugs, pregnant, in gangs, in jail or dead. Dr. Marshall committed to them that if they stuck with him – and stayed away from drugs and violence – he would help them go to college. The next year, in 1988, he sent his first class of students to pursue their postsecondary educational goals.

Over the program’s history, 135 students – male and female – have passed through the Omega classroom and graduated from college. Forty-nine are currently enrolled, and another 10 to 15 will enroll next fall. They find the program through Dr. Marshall’s nationally syndicated radio show Street Soldiers, friends and family who have participated, or referrals from the juvenile court system. “However they come to us, they have to want to be here to succeed. These young people come from communities with drop-out rates of 65% or higher. You can’t turn that around without dealing directly with the issues these students face every day,” says Marshall.

Omega students attend class one night a week, with an extra night of intensive preparation added for students who are six months away from entering college. Class includes 90 minutes of math and 90 minutes of research and writing, but woven into all studies are reorientation methods that help students distinguish themselves from street culture. “We might study ‘Boyz N Da Hood’ and Shakespeare in the same class,” Marshall says, “and that is how they learn.”

Students going to college apply for and receive scholarships averaging $10,000 per year based heavily on their performance in the program. They reapply each year for support, and reciprocate by returning to inspire and motivate future classes of Omega graduates.

Outlining the obstacles his work continually faces, Dr. Marshall lists the negative influences of today’s music, the need for funding and the national lack of interest in addressing the needs of young people of color, particularly young African-American men. Finding that mutual interest in College Access Foundation of California, says Marshall, was a great relief.

“Our missions are aligned. With this invaluable funding,” he says of College Access Foundation’s recent $100,000 grant, “we are addressing the needs of these young people together. We couldn’t do this work without them. Plus,” he adds with a smile, “I get to sleep at night!”

Dr. Marshall’s prescription for violence prevention and education is quickly expanding from the Bay Area to national and international audiences. He works regularly with traditional schools in the San Francisco Bay Area to help them incorporate his methodologies. Last year in Birmingham, Alabama, Dr. Marshall launched the Alive & Free movement, which he describes as an update of the civil rights movement, encouraging young people to eliminate violence from their lives and their communities. In November, 2007, the State Department’s Bureau of International Information Programs sent him on a two-week-long, four-city visit to South Africa where he worked with young people, and community-based and governmental youth-serving agencies. The program was such a success that he has already been invited back to continue the work.

For more information on College Access Foundation grants visit our Grants page. To read more College Access Foundation grantee spotlights, visit our Spotlight Archive.

To learn more about Omega Boys Club/Street Soldiers, visit StreetSoldiers.org.