Eolufemi

http://www.blackplanet.com/Eolufemi/

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Colleges and Universities

Seems like the urge to update my personal message only strikes me late night when the brain starts to slow to a creeping crawl...So dont mind me while I ramble. Me, I got a restless mind when my hands arent occupied, which explains why I dont sleep at night like I should. So in the moments when my hands are occupied I'm usually writing, reading, running and reminiscing on times past. Okay that was a wack attempt at alliteration. Nothing wrong with being corny at times, shows you dont take yourself too seriously, so bear with my failed attempts at humor;) Either way I do enjoy the written word and sometimes I fancy myself a writer. Want to trade stories, hit me up anytime. But I warn you, writing for me is a cathartic release so I write stories that reflect how I feel. One day it might be about the black revolution, the next im waxing on love and love lost. So im all over the board, but i love a good yarn and dont discriminate. From movies to mangas, Im a connoisseur per say of stories. So again if you got material, I dont mind checking it out and telling you if you suck. Other than that Im a sports guy. Pretty much Im one of those cats that still remembers being good at XYZ in high school but never really followed my talent anywhere. So now i get off on saying what the professionals should be doing if I was in their position. Want to talk basketball or even golf, Im down. The same goes for competition in general. Im super competitive whether its ping pong or chess. Break out the cards and Im down for spades. Just the type of guy I am. If you cant tell I dont mind the sound of my voice. But as far as what I like in people. Usually its an affinity for standing out rather than fitting in. I root for the underdog always and I love to see us win. Okay lets see what else. Oh a huge part of my day life revolves around my job which I enjoy. In my younger days i wanted to be a revolutionary. But these days they just call that being progressive. For me Marcus Garvey, Geronimo Ji Jaga and Tupac Shakur represented what the struggle is all about. Putting everything on the line to move something greater than yourself just a smidge closer to better. But it just so happens that I grew up in relatively stable community and have a great mommy and daddy that gave me a good life. So i got to go to college and get a degree that made it so I didnt have to hustle, conspire against the government or rap just to get by. And when you go to college with intentions of being a revolutionary what that usually means is that you spend a lot of time with your buddies rapping, writing poems, skipping class, going to rallies, reading books, mentoring kids, talking shht to the police, picking out headwraps and wishing you were born 40 years ago when black folk gave a damn about giving a damn. So anyway I got out of college and decided to put my energy into the "black community" as a social worker. Cut my teeth in Atlanta as a victim witness advocate working with girls and women that were victims of violent crime. I saw a lot of crazzy shht that changed my perspective on life and my black people. Women refusing to testify against men trying to kill them. Mothers choosing their pedophile boyfriends over their children. At the time child prostitution and pimping was huge in Atlanta and it was sad trying to get 13 year old girls to love themselves enough to realize some pimp four times their age wasnt their boyfriend and certainly wasnt going to take care of them. Given my love of hiphop at the time the reality of that pimping shht kinda pushed my too short collection to the back of my rotation. So after about a year of that I realized change wasnt going to happen one child prostitute at a time, but I was pretty good with kids and young folks so I found myself working at mental health facility for "children and adolescents." This is where I got to witness the ugly side of the helping profession. I saw kids getting mandated by courts to the facility for "treatment and counseling" yet the services amounted to having the kids pick up trash on teh side of the road and billing medicaid or their insurance for that "treatment". Needless to say I realized change had to happen on a policy level and that individual shh was going to drive me crazy, so I got an "internship" at a policy institute in Georgia for a year working on juvenile justice and child welfare reform. I had a great boss that gave me a lot of freedom to push the envelope policy wise. Got deep in a legislative battle over trying juveniles as adults in the state. I identified teh "reverse waiver" mechanism as a loophole in the law allowing prosecutors to abuse their discretion in deciding which juveniles would be sent to adult court versus the juvenile court. Of course our kids were the main ones being sent to the adult system for decade longs sentences while their kids were being sent back to juvenile court for rehab. Obviously I didnt win that battle cause Georgia's justice system is still preying on our kids but it was a good learning experience, cause I learned how government really works and what power and influence really means. I learned that the picket signs, sit ins and marches are worthless without power in the right place with the right access to other powerful people. So I set out to be one of those powerful people in the best way I knew how. I've been grinding it out in a Ph.D program in michigan for the past four years now and just completed my dissertation. And Im proud to say the plan is working. ive been fortunate in that my profession allows me to be compensated for making the world "a better place." (All you would be revolutionaries, go to school, being dr. so and so makes a difference. your expertise is power). Im literally a policy analyst and program evaluator. these days i'm working more on a local community level. we're in the midst of changing the system around here so that around 50% of the kids that would normally get sent to juvie or put on probation are actually being diverted to non-criminal justice systems. so all this mixing minor and low risk offenders with major hard core criminals should be a thing of the past come this time next year. this is relevant to bla ck folk primarily because black youth usually dont get lenient treatment from courts like whites do. so where white youth might get arrested and their cases never go to trial, black youth dont get the benefit of the doubt. so with the way we're changing the system black youth that warrant that benefit of the doubt will finally get it. The work has been getting a lot of attention lately. Between the national science foundation and american psychological association, Ive gotten some prestigious awards that have only made it easier to infiltrate the Death Star. But I must say the further I get the fewer and fewer familiar faces I see. And the black folks that I find myself around in this stage tend to be either old or sell-outs. All I can really say is that its that much harder to change things for the better when we dont have numbers in a position of power. So black folk start having babies again, get an education and get power. We need more soldiers out here...

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