In a candid conversation, Dr. Maxine Mimms shares the story of Evergreen State College's early beginnings. She describes how the school became an institution of higher learning, and how the model has been used to educate and prepare a new generation of urban youth in our society. Its mission and its students are far from traditional and its graduates have become leaders in industry throughout the world.

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Folks from near and far gathered to pay tribute to Dr. Maxine Mimms on her 80th Birthday. The lives she's touched testify to her ability to change us all - together and yet personally as well.

The photos share the faces of people from all walks of life who share a common bond with our beloved Dr. Mimms. Good food, good fun, and good company, too. What a wonderful time to be alive!

Birthday Photos

On January 19, 2008 the Washington State Chapter of the National Association of Blacks in Criminal Justice (NABCJ), and Evergreen College Tacoma Alumni Chapter held a Multi-Faith Prayer Breakfast honoring Dr. Maxine B. Mimms, Tacoma educator, mentor, and leader whose career spans over four decades.

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The Black History Project is the brainchild of Brave New World's CEO, Shyan Selah. A simple idea of wanting to publicly honor those that have most influenced him in life and music quickly spawned into a need to engage the community as a whole. What started out as a tribute to Jimi Hendrix, James Brown, Sarah Vaughn, John Coltrane, Isaac Hayes, and other musicians has also turned into a personal honoring of those he's known to have affected people in such a way that changes lives forever.

The Scanner article...

Three years after its inception in 2004, MMA launches a Strategic Plan to transform public education in this country. By working with students temporarily displaced from public education, their families, community leaders, teachers and school districts, MMA develops a best practices model for public education. The plan includes action research on innovative educational approaches, establishing powerful public and private partnerships, convening collaboratoriums for community stakeholders, providing education, prevention of displacement and intervention for students and families, and building MMA’s capacity to perform and help others replicate the model.

MMA Strategic Plan

Marian Wright Edelman has written on a theme dear to our hearts. Her analysis and prescriptions overlap our approach to supplementary education. She writes...

"The increasing criminalization of children has become a major crisis. Children are being suspended and expelled from school and incarcerated in the juvenile and adult justice systems at alarming rates and at younger and younger ages. This increased incarceration is not due to an increase in serious delinquent or violent criminal behavior by young people. Juvenile arrests for violent crimes grew rapidly in the late 1980s and peaked in 1994, but then began falling. Between 1994 and 2003, the juvenile arrest rate for Violent Crime Index offenses__-murder, forcible rape, robbery and aggravated assault_-fell 48 percent to its lowest level since 1980. So if actual crime is not the cause for the rise in incarceration rates, what is?

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The Academy's web provider, Clark Internet Publishing, has announced support for podcasting beginning in December 2006. The academy's technology program is examining ways to incorporate podcasting into outreach and program activities.

More about podcasting

The Summer Inner-City Excursion Program is designed to reduce isolation for children living in the inner city. In collaboration with the Maxine Mimms Academies, T.E.A.C.H., Wells Fargo Bank, Columbia Bank, Pierce County Transit, National Youth Congress, Bembry Consulting Services, students are exposed to a variety of community activities and resources.
More pictures of the I.C.E. are in the Gallery.

The Academy's Triage program's principles have been stated before, but in our new Guidepost section we thought it appropriate to repeat them.

• Parent understanding of how to advocate for their child’s education is the answer to a system that is unable to cope with cultural differences
  
• Self-efficacy is the answer to a system of suspension and expulsion over which the child has no control.
  
• The development of self-efficacy can only occur in a place of safety, an oasis of hope, where students can reflect and begin to tell new stories.
  
• Self-efficacy is developed by a shift in language: “I do not go to a failing school; my school is the greatest school.” “Maxine Mimms Academies is the only solution for me because I am the solution for the world.” “I return to my school as a success because I am the solution for my school.”
  
• The reality of the hip-hop culture must meet the demands of a future; the absence of hope must transcend into the ability to forgive, dream, and tell new stories.
  
• Community institutions must speak a new language: the language of WASL, of standardized tests. Business owners must preach it from behind the cash register; Pastors must preach it from the pulpit; Doctors and nurses must preach it in offices and emergency rooms; police officers must preach it from squad cars.
  Parents must speak a new language: the language of zero tolerance, why my child, and WASL
  
• Parents, children, community institutions must cross the cultural barriers to welcome each other, to have a conversation, to take in, to love, to forgive, to become healthy.
  
• The child, the parent, the pastor, the business owner, doctor, lawyer, and governor must know that each child is valuable. Each child is good.

This new Triage section in the MMA Guidepost concentrates news about our Triage program here on the Triage overview page and simultaneously displays it in the Guidepost. Click any title to read more on the subject in the Guidepost, which in turn connects you to other information inside and outside our site.

Dr. Maya Angelou is a well known American poet and a long-time friend of academy founder Dr. Maxine Mimms. Ms. Angelou recently gave Dr. Mimms permission to use her poem, A Pledge to Rescue Our Youth, as a call to action for the academy.

What they're saying: Maxine Mimms Academy is getting noticed. As we find press coverage we'll pass it along here.

Press links 2004-05