Aja Brown Quotes

… the idea is to make the school useful to the community as a whole. It will be in use during the day for the children, but from the moment they are out of the building their elders may use it until they go to bed at night. It is to function as a community center …

We look in our own backyard and say, 'How do we help at-risk families, at risk youth? How do we think through some of the problems affecting the Pacific Northwest and make some change there?'

One family should not have to have five case managers to get help from one state agency.

I think police officers can work with social workers and public health nurses to do so much in terms of addressing the problem of American families, of children in American families as a whole, and giving them an opportunity to get off to a fresh start, to become self-sufficient, to lead safe, constructive lives.

Foundations have to think outside the box and maybe expand past the usual suspects that get all of the funding and start thinking about how to reach into communities and support community healing on a more local level.

We've got to figure out a way to cause communities to also want them, the political, organized bodies.

And what is needed to prevent them from joining gangs was ample recreation for boys as well as girls, jobs and internships for training and money, and assistance to allow their families to live in decent homes.

For practitioners of community development, as in any field, joining a network of like-minded professionals is important for building skills and becoming aware of opportunities and resources.

I've experienced first-hand the wonderful work organizations like J Bar J do for young people in Central Oregon and I am encouraged that the federal government is taking an active role in the Cascade Youth and Family Center.

I came up in the community center. I used to be physical director of the South Central Community Center in Chicago on 83rd. It's still there. It used to be around there when I was a kid.

For our welfare reform efforts to be successful, we must empower local charitable organizations with the resources to address their local community needs.

is clothed with powers competent to calling for the resources of the community.

The L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center has this wonderful program where they take in the youth, feed them, help them learn how to cook, clean, they help them get jobs, help them learn how to save their money, and they have shelters all over the city.

For somebody like me, who has trained barefoot in a small village in Odisha, I know training without proper facilities can be extremely difficult. Having experienced it all, I would like to give back to my community by creating a running academy for children.

Bureaucratic systems are not set up to be what we refer to as human service organizations. They were established to collect revenue and maintain law and order and they used a law and order approach in providing family planning services.

And some needs and hurts are so deep they will only respond to a mentor's touch or a pastor's prayer. Church and charity, synagogue and mosque, lend our communities their humanity, and they will have an honored place in our plans and laws.

Either we stay at home and become pillars of the community or we go out and tour. We couldn't really find any communities that still needed pillars.

Like most parents in the US, they are trying, with a little help from UNICEF, to do the best they can to help their children reach their full potential.

Did it ever occur to anyone that if you put nice libraries in public schools you wouldn't have to put them in prisons?

Even in decision-making, we work in self-help groups. That is women coming together in small groups of 10 to sometimes 15 women, where they start to get education about their rights, about clean water and sanitation, about how to have a healthy birth. You can bring in all kinds of education to them that way.

When schools truly become centers of the community, where you have extraordinary teachers, the best teachers, the best principals, great nonprofit partners coming in during the non-school hours to support and do enrichment activities, social services, then those students will beat the odds, will beat poverty, will beat violence in the community, will beat sometimes dysfunctional families, and be productive citizens long term. They will go to college.

I will go and speak at rotary clubs. I will go and speak at schools. I'm so much in the community, but in a way that I love. It's been such a positive thing.

I'd like to see people, instead of spending so much time on the ethical problem, get after the problems that really affect the people of this country

Everybody thinks that you go to Africa and you build a school, or you teach English, or you build a hospital. But actually all you need to do is play football with kids for six months and then after they've trusted you, you tell them about the truth of Aids, and that their grandmother didn't die from witchcraft, she died from Aids. And that's the biggest difference you can make.

We should learn ... to do our best for the sake of our communities and for the sake of those for whom we pave the way.