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COMMENTARY
The Next Generation of Leaders
By. Marian Wright Edelman
NNPA Columnist
People often ask me where the next generation of leaders will come from. I know they will be young men and women like Westenley Alcenat. Wes’ fellow students at his Minneapolis high school call him the “kid who always smiles.� But the constant optimism and infectious smile he shows now as a teenager weren’t always there in the little boy who “grew accustomed to seeing dead bodies, and hearing rapes from the neighbor’s door.�
Wes was one of four extraordinary high school students recently honored at the Children’s Defense Fund Minnesota’s Beat the Odds® celebration. Beat the Odds was initiated by CDF in 1990 to celebrate the positive potential of young people like Wes who are succeeding and doing well in school despite having to overcome enormous obstacles. He grew up in Haiti, where violence and political instability turned playgrounds into battlefields and his childhood into a series of unimaginable horrors. As he says, “I was part of a cycle in which the future seemed grim and hopeless…I witnessed the darkest conditions of poverty, where projects are made of shacks and mud huts; where dreams are nonexistent, a place where hope lies dead and buried by political unrest.�
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