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MMA Guidepost
☰ Community
MMA-IFC relationship is growing
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A Special Thank You
![]() Garden of Eden The Garden of Eden is a Community Agricultural Initiative. It features the collaboration of the Maxine Mimms Academies - a 501(c)(3) non-profit, The Evergreen State College Tacoma, and the City of Tacoma. The Garden of Eden is designed to grow healthy, safe, affordable, organic vegetables, herbs, plants and flowers all year long. In addition to supplying abundant quality food, this initiative creates many long term, good paying, local jobs and a new sustainable economic institution. There’s a growing body of evidence that urban farming not only strengthens community bonds, but it also reduces violence and stress. Research has shown that if you diminish violence, people will be less stressed, and less–stressed people eat healthier. By embracing indoor urban farming, we are not deluding ourselves that we're solving the food desert problem. What we’re doing is using food as a tool to change individual lives and to change our community for the better. The bigger win is jobs – and jobs nurture a whole community, with pride, self esteem, good health and a true sense of community. Thanks for your support. Michael Twiggs Garden of Eden Project Director Maxine Mimms Academies Plant a seed. Grow a child.
Critical Conversations
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Dr. Angelou Poem Speaks to MMA Objectives
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A Pledge to Rescue Our Youth
A Poem by Dr. Maya Angelou Young women, young men of color, we add our voices to the voices of your ancestors who speak to you over ancient seas and across impossible mountain tops. Come up from the gloom and national neglect, you have already been paid for. Come out of the shadow of irrational prejudice, you owe no racial debt to history. The blood of our bodies and the prayers of our souls have bought you a future free from shame and bright beyond the telling of it. We pledge ourselves and our resources to seek for you clean and well-furnished schools, safe and non-threatening streets, employment that makes use of your talents, but does not degrade your dignity.
You are the best we have. We pledge you our whole hearts from this day forward.
A Need for Action
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Over one million African-American students are being suspended each school year. More than 100,000 are suspended in the I-5 corridor.
Marian Wright Edelman Sounds a Familiar Theme
![]() "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?
It’s Hip-Hop and Hope at Academy
Eleven-year-old Booker Beaver has been suspended from school more than once, a punishment that in the past meant staying home and playing video games.
This time is different. He's attending class five days a week at the Maxine Mimms Academy, a new community program for students suspended or expelled from Tacoma middle schools. Booker says he prefers the academy over McIlvaigh Middle School. "But we don't want to stay forever," said Booker, who was suspended for fighting. "This is just to calm us down." Recent Posts
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