TAC Community Pledge
Hope and opportunity, peace and safety are the birthright, every child should be guaranteed. To that end:
- We pledge to build a community of guarantors to ensure that birthright;
- We pledge that each child learns they are somebody;
- We pledge their dreams and visions will become Columbus’ future;
- We pledge to raise and feed hope and opportunity;
- We pledge that “the best way to control the future is to create it.”;
- We pledge like the Iroquois, that “In our every deliberation, we must consider the impacts of our decisions on the next seven generations.”;
- We pledge our minds, hearts and hands in our every effort to “improvise, adapt and overcome”; and lastly;
- We pledge to stop violence, build peace and create positive futures for Columbus’ children.
Our Mission
The mission of Turn Around Columbus (TAC) is to empower youth with hope, opportunities, and the tools to succeed. To achieve this mission, we create community-based education opportunities to empower youth with a positive self-concept, responsibility, experience, confidence, and the skills necessary to make a difference in the workplace and community.
Our target population is youth, but we approach them holistically by also including their parents and their schools in our work. We believe youth are community change agents and through early investment and mentorship they can become the foundation of healthy families and safe, vibrant communities.
Our Vision
Turn Around Columbus’ vision for community building and experiential education coupled with strong professional urban design elevates human behavior, creates economic opportunity, and restores dignity.
Our Inspiration and Guidance
Declaration
Saving Lives
Make no mistake, let’s be very clear. This is about life and death…saving lives. Every night, every day we see new killings and violence, kids killing kids…. terrorizing neighborhoods. And worse, the killings have a ripple multiplier effect, destroying not only victims, but perpetrators, families, communities, futures, and hope.
Generating Hope and Building Peace
To confront and counter this violence the Farm, Gardens, entrepreneurship, the Trail and all other TAC efforts are catalysts for generating hope and building peace. We are individually and collectively committed to demonstrating, training and showing children how to be hope dealers, peacemakers and peace builders. To do so requires we heed Einstein’s words: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
Process
Part of thinking different is seeing TAC as a process able to adapt to changing sets of needs and unexpected consequences, attempting to dissolve the reasons these problems exist, not just solve them, and understanding the “best way to control the future is to create it.” (Russell Ackoff)
Our Inspiration and Guidance
To keep our focus clear and our commitment strong we look to history changing thinking to inspire and guide us:
- George Washington Carver’s extraordinary innovations that bridged divides and changed lives and a nation
- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s ongoing vision and transcendent inspirational tools for peace
- Iroquois’ Great Law of Peace, and the Tree of Great Peace, ending decades of bloody battles. They created the longest standing treaty among nations. shaping US democracy and giving us the Seventh Generation Principle dictating that decisions that are made today should lead to sustainability for seven generations into the future.
“Ninety-nine percent of the failures come from people who have the habit of making excuses.” George Washington Carver
