So how do you reach a young person heavily involved in the Crips gang and gun crime and persuade him to go to school?  

Educators and community leaders say it’s difficult, and sometimes impossible, to get kids to turn their lives around.

How do you motivate young people who have missed parts of a school year, or entire years of school, to return? And how do you keep young people from returning to gang life when school life gets tough? 

It takes a special person to make that type of breakthrough. Jason McBride is the one person I’ve met who does not seem to have that problem. 

Elfay returned to his dad’s home in Aurora after completing his sentence at King County juvenile detention center in Seattle. McBride was there to meet him and support him as he tried to turn his life around.

McBride instantly struck a good rapport with Elfay. They shared a common bond; McBride is a former gang member himself. When McBride was 18, he got shot, and it was a reality check for him.

He could see where his life was heading and he didn’t want that lifestyle anymore. He went to college and has spent the next 33 years trying to get Black teenagers to see a future beyond gangs.

Hart Van Denburg/CPR News

McBride said, “There’s a Chinese proverb that is probably my favorite proverb, and it states: ‘If you want to know what’s on the road ahead, ask a man that’s walking back.’ And that is, I feel like I’m that man that’s walking back, and I’m walking back from a lot of these ugly things that these kids are trying to walk towards, and they don’t know what’s up there. 

“It’s loss, it’s separation, it’s incarceration, it’s drug abuse, it’s all these ugly, ugly things. And I’m coming back from those things and these kids are walking up there and I’m trying to stop ’em in that road and saying, ‘Hey, let’s find you another path because you don’t want to go up there.’”

With the help and support of McBride, Elfay graduated from Aim Global Academy. 

But education is just one of the solutions McBride is pursuing.