Pillars

SAVE Institute is founded on four pillars which make up its acronym:

● Service – Instills humility, selflessness and a sense of purpose

● Agriculture – Reconnects youth to Nature while providing fresh food for their communities

● Vocational Training – Gives youth something to contribute to society while providing for themselves & their families

● Entrepreneurship – Liberation from dependency on others; motivates creativity

The Problem

African American male youth and young adults are more likely than any other group in the US to experience negative life outcomes such as poverty, crime, incarceration, and homicide. Approximately 31% of black male children in the US grow up in poverty. Approximately 30% of black males experience prison incarceration in their lifetime and are about 6 times more likely to go to prison than white males in the US. Black males are more likely to be murdered than any other race or gender group in the US at an average of about 6,400 murders per year. Black male youth face about a 52% high school dropout rate. These dynamics are not the result of them being inherently bad people. They are the result of unjust systems that have been in place for centuries that were intentionally designed to prevent them from being successful. For example, during the 1960’s and 70’s, the federal government launched a counterintelligence program which outlined one of its goals as being the prevention of the rise of a “black messiah”. During this same time period, the US witnessed the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Fed Hampton and several other black male leaders who attempted to change these systems. The root causes do not lie solely within the education system, the justice system, the policing system, the food system, family dynamics, the music industry or ghettoized community systems. The root causes of these problems lie within the combination of all of them. While certain dynamics have improved in the US for African Americans, most of the same systems still exist that continue to suppress the growth and progress of African American males.

The Solution

SAVE Institute is fighting to SAVE black male youth from these negative cycles through a holistic formula of development experiences designed to propel them to success. SAVE is an acronym that stands for Service, Agriculture, Vocational Training and Entrepreneurship. These elements, along with our concentrated focus on character development, emotional intelligence, leadership and purpose discovery make up the foundation for all of our programs.  SAVE launched a full-time accelerated high school in Atlanta in September 2021, where students can earn their diploma while being immersed in the above elements that SAVE is founded upon. The goal is to transform them into leaders that will go back into their communities as agents of change. Our current educational systems and justice systems continue to produce the same negative results. Our approach is to create an alternative system that will uplift rather than suppress.

This high school program is an innovative alternative to traditional high school. This approach to high school allows for students to learn academics through projects, life experiences, agriculture, vocational work and implementing business enterprises. Students spend the majority of their school experience working on our farm, working within their vocational trade, leading service projects and piloting their own business ventures, with minimal time sitting inside of classrooms. The long-term goal is for the high school to become a boarding school, which would allow for these young men to get away from their home environments, which often pull them down, and be immersed in an uplifting environment that is propelling them forward. They will return to their communities as solutions to the problems rather than being a part of the problem.