Jaevion Nelson | Don't overhype hope to youths

Everywhere you turn these days, someone is encouraging our young people to have a positive relationship with money because they have the tools at their disposal to create wealth. One can only imagine how enthralled many young people are by these opportunities even if it means paying your last $1,000 to hear an inspirational story about how someone moved from poverty to prosperity and convince you that you can do it, too.

In principle, I have no problem with motivating and helping our young people in this regard. I am generally excited about the efforts to create new possibilities for our young people.

I do, however, take issue with how many of these sessions seem to be done. The diverse circumstances of the young people being engaged seldom seem to be taken into consideration. I have also seen quotes from speakers who, perhaps unwittingly, blame the participants for their economic circumstances rather than the systemic challenges that affect their life outcomes. This bothers me.

What an awful thing it is to have a nicely dressed person, who might have come from communities like yours or one far removed, lecture you about money and wealth creation for a couple minutes or hours with no plan for follow-up? Imagine being told that you can create wealth by someone who isn't convinced that this is a reality?

Imagine being talked to about prosperity by people who are hardly interested in actually tackling poverty, by someone who would not even lend their voice to debates about better pay for people like you, your brother, your sister and your parents who are at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder?

The whole thing looks a lot of the entrepreneurship training craze for poor people in poor communities some of whom can barely read and write and feed themselves at night and who, subsequent to the training/workshop, will have little no access to the resources required to actually get a business started, if they even had an idea for a startup in the first place.

Sadly, the economic circumstances in our country, especially for many of our young people, make these talks and trainings seem plausible.

Who wouldn't want to hear how they can become a millionaire?

 

Wealth creation fad

 

From what I have observed, the wealth creation fad, as I call it, tends to target young people who are especially vulnerable those living in low income communities and families that are poor.

On the face of it, they seem okay, but we need to exercise greater care when doing these things.

The intention is often good but they can inadvertently sell false hope and ignore the structural barriers that limit people's ability to actually create wealth for themselves. They have to be done in tandem with initiatives that address the needs and realities of the young people they are targeting.

Economist and Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen, in his book Development as Freedom, reminds us that "development requires the removal of major sources of unfreedom: poverty as well as tyranny, poor economic opportunities as well as systematic social deprivation, [and] neglect of public facilities".

Young people do not simply want people to talk to them about wealth creation. They need people who will be champions for better opportunities and an improvement in their livelihood.

Their future hinges on not just their initiative but that of people who will work assiduously to ensure that they are actually in receipt of the opportunities, tools and resources they need to be content, to live their fullest potential and make better for themselves.

It's not enough to simply teach vulnerable youth to fish. Some of them need the fishing line, the bait and may even need you to show them where the fishes actually are.

Let's endeavour to take more meaningful actions for our young people. They are depending on us.

Jaevion Nelson is a human-rights, economic- and social-justice advocate. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and jaevion@gmail.com, or tweet @jaevionn.