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Will-I-Am is the bomb! Not because of his music, which I can take or leave. Mostly leave. But Will-I-Am is the bomb because he has done something that makes him stand out from among the crowd of “Hollywood A-Listers”. He has created a scholarship fund to put young people through college who normally couldn’t afford to go. He launched the scholarship program last May on the Oprah show and had already chosen four young dedicated and focused black teenaged boys as the first recipients of the fund. These outstanding young men all desperately wanted to go to college, but didn’t know how they would be able.
These beautiful, confident and articulate young men definitely fit the description of being hard workers and focused far above their present circumstances. They may not have known how they would go to college, but obviously they believed they would somehow, because they worked so hard to prepare themselves! And these boy come from what so many like to say is the ”pathological’ home structure of “single parent homes”. Well, well, well! It IS possible for black boys to dream BIG! As Oprah would say, the Universe alligned itself to accommodate these young men in their quest for top rated college educations! Will-I-Am was the conduit that these boys needed. Will has pledged to pay for full tuition, room and board and books for four years for each of the four young brothers. One of the boys have chosen to go to Virginia Tech for the engineering program, another of the boys have chosen Hampton for its pharmacology program and another chose Cabrini College respectively! BEAU-TI-FUL!!
Now why is it that I haven’t heard this story anywhere in the media since Oprah reported it??!! Imma leave that alone!
Now you got to truly love Will-I-Am because his investment in our black youth is going to cost him about $140, 000 a year for all four of the boys! At the end of the day, without inflation, it will cost him about $600, 000 to educate all four boys. Now that’s saying something to invest nearly three quarters of a million dollars into four black boys from the ‘hood! I know there are many who would say those boy aren’t worth much more than a jail cell or a life of low expectations and low achievement, especially since they come from “single parent homes”. I admire Will-I-Am because rather than complain about what’s not happening, he stepped up to the plate and did what HE was able to do!! Black power in action, people!
It’s important for us to read these kinds of true life pearls of our narrative! We need the balance. This type of story is just as much a part of us and more so, than all the negative crap that we find ourselves gorging on. And just like any junk food, that empty stuff tends to mis-shape us into raving emotional cripples and self hating caricatures, carrying alot of unnecessary negative weight in our spirits, without having any depth of understanding about ourselves as a people!
For more information check Will’s I-Am Scholarship Program.
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How wonderful is this?!? I had no idea. Thanks for sharing this.