Often referred to as television’s favorite Survivor, Rupert Boneham is an entrepreneur with a professional focus and a strong commitment to support the Community and individuals in need.
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- Individual Donations
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- Individual Donations
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Our Program's Success Rate
- Kids that have graduated!
- Kids that have dropped out
- Kids that have graduated!
- Kids that have dropped out
The Problem
“When you’re released from prison with your first felony and you have no education, you have no sense of self-worth, never worked a legal day in your life, you don’t have a good address and you have the “Scarlet Letter” of the detention center on your back… you’re not getting a job… you’re not getting an apartment… you’re not getting all those essential things that folks without a felony take for granted.”
So when you’re released into that scenario… how do you survive?
When you can’t get access to a legal way of making a living and you’ve been surrounded from birth by folks working the system to take every handout, and/or commit crime to provide their living… when your choice of housing is in slum, ran by a slum lord who comes once a week to collect the $100 dollar rent and if you cant pay, kicks in your door and tosses your belongings on the street…
… when you’re taught the “family trade”, when the only one in your neighborhood with money in their pocket is the drug-dealer, the pimps, the thieves, the fences, the forgers…
… it is going to take strength to stand up to the family and friends and say, “I don’t need that. I can take care of myself.” But then you’re battling everything you been taught all your life… how to use the system… and take… how to use the people around you… and take… how to use the people who are trying to help you… and take.
The Solution
I have shown for 25 years how you take a person who has only been trained to hold their hand out and teach them… empower them.. show them that they have that energy and ability to take care of themselves. There is no one out there who can’t go to work.
Taking young men and women, that have never been shown how to make a legal living and raising them… by the time they are 20 or 30 years old, do you really think they’re ever going to get it? No… they’re going, for the rest of their life’s, to be holding their hand out… we’re creating a giant problem.
We need to empower, instead of beat down and punish… educate and train instead of belittle and degrade. Create a system that doesn’t class people as expendable. Right now, we do deem the bottom 20% of our society as expendable… it’s always been that way… it’s disgusting… those are the ones who need us the most… they are the ones that cost us the most money by having to provide for them when they don’t work… they’re the ones that could help us most… they are an underutilized resource.
We’ve ran 19 young people through our empower and re-entry program… every one of them was on the path to become career criminals, that would have cost us $40,000 to $50,000 a year in a small community, $70,000 to $80,000 a year in a larger community to lock them up… and all that gets us is the ability to spend that or more next year.
Rupert’s Kids spends $5,000 to $10,000 per person, empowering and teaching that person to take care of themselves and save our communities $30,000 to $70,000 a year, and fill that person with self-worth and work-ethics that help keep them from committing further crimes.
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