MI Food Bank Needs Food!

MI Youth and Family Services is in desperate need of food for the Food Bank. They need all kinds of food.

Now that school is out families have greater need for food since children are no longer getting meals at school.

Please bring food to either wicker basket located in front of the office and in front of the Community Life Center (gym) and we will deliver it to the MI Food Bank.

Thanks!

Good News From Youthcare

A message from Melinda Giovengo, Executive Director of Youthcare, one of MIPC’s Mission Partners:

On Thursday night I had the privilege of attending the Seattle Public Schools Interagency Academy Graduation.( our in house school at Orion, YouthBuild and the Bridge)

YouthCare had a total of 16 graduates this represented almost 25 % of all the graduates this year from interagency. Our young people beamed and were so proud as they paraded in cap and gown. They were cheered by 20 YC staff members who attended. If ever there was a moment to know we are on the right path THIS WAS IT. One young woman who had been on the run from the Bridge returned to most of the staff celebrating her success. She said she left but “could not go back out there on the streets, she was different now.”.. she is in foster care and calls us EVERY DAY.

Good News About Asa Mercer Middle School

Principal Andhra Lutz has taken a new job in Washington D.C. as the instructional leader of a whole group of high poverty schools. To meet this challenge, she brings with her the story of the successful transformation of Asa Mercer Middle School. In the five years she has been at Mercer it has become a high achieving, high poverty school.

Some of MIPC’s tutors met with Susan Toth, former Associate Principal and new Asa Mercer Principal on June 7 to hear an update on Mercer’s year and plans for the future. Susan has had a chance to work with Andhra for the last 5 years and has been part of most decisions about the school. She will carry on the work that has transformed Asa Mercer’s identity.

At our meeting she told us that the free and reduced lunch program is used by 78% of the school’s population. They now qualify as a Title 1 school which means they have federal funding to help support their students.

Regardless of the high poverty rate, an example of the continued academic achievement is that five years ago, Mercer’s science test scores were at 18% and now they are at 70%...higher than other more affluent middle schools. The one word that Susan repeated several times about their commitment to academic achievement was “relentless.” Nothing will deter them from working for students’ academic achievement.

Our tutors have been privileged to see the transformation at Mercer over the eleven years that we have been there. As many of the tutors have said, “It’s a great place to be.” They speak of the talented and committed staff and the respectful and hard working students.

If you’d like more information about joining the MIPC tutor team, please contact Linda Fetters, lfetters@aol.com.

She’s 10 and May Be Sold to a Brothel

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

KOLKATA, India

M. is an ebullient girl, age 10, who ranks near the top of her fourth-grade class and dreams of being a doctor. Yet she, like all of India, is at a turning point, and it looks as if her family may instead sell her to a brothel.

Her mother is a prostitute here in Kolkata, the city better known to the world as Calcutta. Ruchira Gupta, who runs an organization called Apne Aap that fights human trafficking, estimates that 90 percent of the daughters of Indian prostitutes end up in the sex trade as well. And M. has the extra burden that she belongs to a subcaste whose girls are often expected to become prostitutes.

M. seemed poised to escape this fate with the help of one of my heroes, Urmi Basu, a social worker who in 2000 started the New Light shelter program for prostitutes and their children.

M., with her winning personality and keen mind, began to bloom with the help of New Light. Both her parents are illiterate, but she learned English and earned excellent grades in an English-language school for middle-class children outside the red-light district. I’m concealing her identity to protect her from gibes from schoolmates.

Unfortunately, brains and personality aren’t always enough, and India is the center of the 21st-century slave trade. This country almost certainly has the largest number of human-trafficking victims in the world today.

To read more of this article, please go to the Opinion Section of the NY Times for June 2. The New Light Center was the recipient of MIPC's Gifts of the Heart Offering in partnership with Herzl ner Tamid.