For 10 years, the Community Alliance for Progressive Positive Action (CAPPA) has been fighting the good.
Since its founding, CAPPA has been dedicated to showing kids of varied and often disadvantaged backgrounds what a proper living and learning environment looks like.
The program leans hard on counselors who teach children learning and social habits that, in many cases, are non-existent. Without these skills, there is little hope in many cases of breaking the cycle of irresponsibility and dependence that many of these kids grow up in.
But with these skills, there is a very real chance of them becoming productive community citizens here or somewhere else someday.
Getting a head start on the coming school year. Learning how to get along with others. Understanding how to be part of society and respect authority. These sound like intuitive skills. But they are not to someone who has never been around them or taught them.
Recently, there was a fatal shooting in the Flanigan Park. Word circulated that some young kids had been told not to cooperate with police who were trying to find out details surrounding the shooting. Programs such as CAPPA teach kids to take just the opposite view of the society they live in. These children are our future. We need them to be part of a productive society, not a perpetually dependent burden and trouble spot.
The CAPPA program is old enough now that it has quantitative results to show its program is working and a record that earned it the designation of Organization of the Year at the 2011 Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention's national conference.
The program clearly works and we urge people in the community to support it and nurture it in the years to come. For those wanting to find out more about it, there is an open house at CAPPA's new 734 West Fourth Street headquarters from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. today.
