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BUILD Program Updates 04/09/03:
Much has been happening with BUILD since the last SEF newsletter. In our personal lives, Taína is expecting a child in the early summer, and Adrienne delivered her second child in February.
In the fall we launched the BUILD resources website - buildresources.org - a massive collection of resources for young people, primarily in Philadelphia. Though the website will no doubt always be a work in progress (in fact if you know of resources we failed to unearth in our research, please alert us at so that we can add them to the site) a reviewer from Topica.com called it "precisely the kind of aggregated meta-site that makes research on the net tolerable."
Last winter we completed outreach alerting other youth serving agencies in Philadelphia to our existence and our preparedness to begin serving Philadelphia young people through the telephone, the Internet or in person.
We have been serving a growing number of young people looking for information about options and seeking support in identifying and moving toward their goals.
An unexpected result of the BUILD website is that the majority of the email we receive is from young people in North American communities other than Philadelphia, who came across the BUILD website in response to a search for resources on the internet. These young people want to know if there is a BUILD-like program in their area. This recurring theme in email correspondence underlines the value of BUILD as an idea that ought to be reproduced.
The replication of BUILD-like programs seems especially important at this time: the No Child Left Behind Act, Bush's newly enacted education law, contains a provision requiring public secondary schools to provide military recruiters with contact information for every student or face a cutoff of all federal aid. The No Child Left Behind Act will assist the military in their current practice of targeting minority and economically disadvantaged youth for recruitment. Programs that present young people with meaningful alternatives to military service are needed, now more than ever.
BUILD's future plans are to focus outreach activities on Philly's Public High Schools and develop further resource-sharing partnerships with counter-recruitment organizations.
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