The are some good people about!

Ray Lewis, former prison governor and founder of the Eastside Young Leaders Academy in 2002, has shown a way to boost the life chances of young black men, in his academy in Newham, London. So promising has his initiative been that the local Labour MPs support it, and Stephen Norris, former Tory minister is chairman of the academy’s board, while Francis Maude is also on the board.

The statistics are depressing for young black boys. Unemployment among black African and Caribbean people is 8% higher than the national average, black boys are six times more likely to be expelled from school than their white fellow students, and while the black component in the English population is 4.6% black prisoners make up 17% of the prison population. Their underachievement is further shown in the 3% they make up among undergraduates.

Ray Lewis was impressed by what he saw of the Young Leaders Academy of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, while on a visit to the USA, and he decided to replicate something of what he had observed.

He formed the academy, using his own money, as a business and a charity. He was helped by a positive response from Newham Council, who allowed him to seek referred pupils from local schools.

The academy, with about 80 students, offers after-school and week-end academic coaching, including a citizenship programme which stresses “civic responsibility and moral leadership”, The students carry out community work in residential homes and homeless centres, as well as gardening and decorating for the elderly, and they work in other charities.

Parents of students attend monthly meetings, work as volunteers and engage in fund-raising. Many of the students suffer from never having had a male role model, and the academy arranges a team of successful black businessmen to act as mentors.

Lewis is concerned that he saw so many young black men in courtrooms, and his vision is to “seek to prepare as many as possible for the boardrooms.”

This is surely an initiative that everyone can welcome – self-financing, self-esteem enhancing, vision enlarging., life-changing. It fits in with everything that Ian Duncan-Smith and his foundation have been saying.

It is a relatively small work in the vast scheme of things, but it deserves to be applauded – it recently won an award from the Guardian newspaper. As someone said, or is it an old Chinese proverb, “It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.”