Welcome
to Another Chance 2 Bridge the Gap, LLC.
We are an up and coming organization where individuals have come
together forming a collective body surrounding a common cause and purpose to
improve the living conditions from the inside incarcerated world to the outside
free world.
We are another chance to take advantage of a
missed opportunity and become another chance to mend our faults or right our
wrongs. Bridging the gap is fixing what’s been broken, rebuilding what has been
destroyed or uniting what has been separated.
This is what we mean by “combing two worlds into one”. Specifically, we are aiming to bridge the
distance between prison and the community, the space between cause and effect,
the uncertainty between problems and solutions.
What began as a few
community events in a small town in SC wanting to help the children and then
two years later, meetings discussing the injustice in America has progressed
into a nationwide movement called Another Chance 2 Bridge the Gap, Inc. Another Chance is an organization about
CHANGE and we see that we need change in America in so many areas.
The question was
eventually raised as to why these problems could exist in the first place. How were these men put in the position to be
abused by any group of individual? The consensus was that too many divisions
exist in our society for it to be any other way. These divisions began in the
home where members of the family have no clear understanding of how a family is
supposed to function; divisions in the neighborhood where trust among neighbors
is minimal at best. It also began in the
schools and workplace where competition among students and coworkers,
respectively, promotes division rather than unity and commonalities and
divisions between the races where fear, distrust and hate for each other make
it virtually impossible for people to unite for the good of their own
interest. All of this has led us to
commit all types of atrocities against each other. All of them regularly contributed to men and
women being sent to prison in large numbers to live under these draconian
conditions.
Because
of our disunity in the community, we lack the ability to overcome such
obstacles as poverty, high levels of crime, poor health, lack of education and
the ability to make decisions about issues that concern us as a community. We discussed the need to repair the
psychological damage to the community and the damage to the community’s sense
of security. This was a social problem
that needed to be addressed and attacked by us.
We had to be curious enough to learn more about the problem, adventurous
enough to accept the challenges that came along with combatting the problem and
fearless enough to face opponents who benefit financially and politically from
our problem.
In
the past, many brave men and women had organized in an effort to obliterate one
or another of the many problems that exist in communities across America. But their focus on only one was precisely the
cause of their failure. Disparities and
inequities exist across the full spectrum of American society. Where one is being closed, another is
negatively affecting the lives of the desperately impoverished pauper on the
streets. We now realize that we must
attack the root causes of all the problems that affect our lives – that being
the rampant dis-unity in our so called “community”. There are too many gaps in society that need
to be bridged to continue doing business as usual. This is our chance to bridge
the gap. People of the world –UNITE!
OUR
MISSION
WE
ARE HERE TO SERVE AND HELP PEOPLE REGARDLESS OF RACE, COLOR, CREED OR RELIGION.
OUR MISSION IS TO HELP BRIDGE THE GAP BETWEEN PEOPLE IN THE COMMUNITY AND
PEOPLE IN PRISON. WE KNOW AND REALIZE THAT SOCIETY IS IN TROUBLE AND THAT WE
ARE THE CHANGE THAT WE WANT TO SEE. OUR MISSION IS TO BUILD AND REBUILD RELATIONSHIPS
WITH OUR FAMILIES, FRIENDS AND EVEN OUR ENEMIES IN ORDER TO MEET A COMMON GOAL
OF HELPING THE PEOPLE. OUR MISSION IS TO BE ABLE TO GIVE A BETTER LIFE TO OUR
CHILDREN THAN THE LIFE THAT WE HAVE LIVED. OUR MISSION IS TO LIVE AND NOT DIE!
OUR MISSION IS TO BE A PART OF THE SOLUTION AND NOT THE PROBLEM.
OUR
VISION
Strengthening
the Families
Teaching
the People
Advancing
the Mind
Reaching
the Lost
Serving
the Communities
7
KEY COMPONENTS
1.
EDUCATION and AWARENESS
2.
FINANCIAL FREEDOM/ECONOMICS
3.
HEALTHY LIVING
4.
FAMILY & COMMUNITY
5.
POLITICS
6.
LEGAL HELP
7.
RELIGION/SPIRITUAL/INSPIRATION
Why These?
At the
center of the problems that prevail in every impoverished community across the
United States is the lack of attention paid to these seven components. That lack of attention has produced factors
in the community that have left it devastated by violence, drugs, disease and
poverty.
ü Education
and Awareness: Our focus on education
and awareness is due to the widespread grievance in low-income communities that
keeps their residents at an unfair disadvantage. Ignorance produces poverty, violence, bad
health, apathy and many other negative characteristics of these communities.
However, as ignorance is only a lack of information or a lack of knowledge,
they can be uprooted through education and awareness. But at a time when
education is such an elusive concept in impoverished communities in the country
the need for better ways of disciplining the mind and raising awareness is
greater than ever. Our process of education
will be not so much s preparation for the future as an experience in itself,
because as we realize that the children are our future, we also realize more
and more each day that the future is right here and right now.
ü Financial
Freedom: For many of us with low-income
backgrounds, financial concerns are the primary causes of most of our stress
and that is to be expected in our current state of economics. But stress pushes
us deeper into a life full of misery. We have to take control of our lives and
our financial well-being.
The Financial Freedom component gives us tips
on how to better our financial situation and learn ways to get out of debt and
manage our funds better. Through this
component we encourage strong financial stability and entrepreneurship for a
better quality of life.
ü Healthy
Living: The world is becoming more and
unhealthier every day. Whether it is a
disease such as diabetes or AIDS, alcohol or drug addiction or obesity the
illnesses we suffer are painful and demoralizing. Our health affects the way we think, the way
we act and how long we live. It also
affects the length and quality of our children’s lives. In addition to the misery, discomfort and
dearth that results from bad health, it is also a major factor in creating
poverty in the community.
If one is sick, he or
she cannot work. Bad health results in
medical costs for doctors, drugs and other curative solutions – costs that
wouldn’t be necessary if we were to maintain a healthy lifestyle. Prevention is better than a cure. The Healthy Living component exists to
encourage us to be in the best health we can be in and to stop the cycle of
poverty and poor health.
ü Family
and Community: It is a well-known fact
that most of the problems endemic to low income communities originate in the
home. Families become dysfunctional for
various reasons. Whether it is financial strain, bad health or any other
stressful situations, the problem of the family will usually affect the
community in catastrophic ways, as has been evidenced by the epidemic levels of
violence and drug activity that has ravaged these areas and sent man of their
residents to prison or to the graves.
The Family and
Community component is intended to strengthen the family unit and spread the
idea of cooperation and solidarity throughout the community. This component is aimed at empowering the
community to take control of their lives and their own social and financial
development so that the vast oceans of problems we experience will vanish from
our lives forever.
ü Politics: Politics is the process by which persons or
groups are brought under the control of others.
It may be done by cunning, deceit, persuasion or force but it always
involves the exercise of power between two opposing forces. The usual political players feed off the apathy
of the masses convincing us that politics is too complicated for us to
comprehend and that we should leave it all up to them.
Apathy is when people
do not care and/or when they feel so powerless that they do not try to change
things, to right a wrong, to fix a mistake or to improve conditions. The purpose of this component is to help the
people reverse this trend; to help them understand that politics affects every
aspect of our lives and that each time we unite with other individuals of like
mind. Also we must know that our power
is weakened and our opponents’ power is strengthened each time we refuse to
engage in it. We must learn how to take
change of our lives.
ü Legal
Help: A growing number of poor people in
the United States are faced daily with matters relating to the law. Yet 80% of them lack the legal aid necessary
to deal with their legal problems. The
prison industrial complex has more than two million prisoners under its
supervision, over half of which would more than likely be granted immediate
release with adequate legal representation.
The Legal Help
component provides a forum for people who have questions, comments and advice
concerning the law to speak to each other for educational purposes. This component encourages people to learn their
basic constitutional rights because in this day and time if you don’t know your
rights, you may as well not have any.
ü Spiritual/Inspiration: The spirit of our community is broken. There is no feeling of hope – only despair,
indifference and fear. We have the
attitude and the belief that we are so helpless and that it is useless to even
attempt to reposition ourselves in society and better the conditions in which
we live. This shared attitude and belief
is the biggest factor in perpetuating our condition.
The purpose of the
Spiritual and Inspirational component is to counter this poverty of spirit that
allows us to think this way. We want to
inspire members of the community to strengthen their POSITIVE beliefs whatever
they may be so that they will be able to contribute to positive social,
political and financial growth.
