Purpose Prize

Marc Freedman Portrait

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Want to Recruit Younger People? Look Within

Want to Recruit Younger People? Look Within

For the past five years, I’ve been working as an advocate for the causes I believe in and for more intergenerational collaboration. Young people like me want more opportunities to work across generations for change, but we also want to be treated as equals.  To...

What Young Leaders Want — And Don’t Want — From Older Allies

What Young Leaders Want — And Don’t Want — From Older Allies

We know from our nationally representative study with NORC at the University of Chicago in 2022 that 76% of Gen Z and 70% of Millennial respondents wish they had more opportunities to work across generations for change.  In a new report, What Young Leaders Want — And...

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Haywood Fennell, Sr.

Stanley Jones Clean Slate Project, Inc.
Purpose Prize Fellow 2007

Promoting literacy through positive self-image.

For Haywood Fennell, Sr. 66, the turn-around came a little over 12 years ago. The former Vietnam Era vet had been in and out of jails and prisons, on and off drugs. After his final stay at a VA detox facility Fennell resided in a homeless shelter for 18 months and began to write his first play, which he produced while living at the shelter entitled, “Harlem Renaissance Revisited with a Boston Flavor.’ The play’s cast includes community leaders and elected officials working with youth as a generational cast in a play that talks about not giving up, triumphs over adversity. He has gone on to found the Oscar Micheaux Theater program and has collaborated with other community-based youth theater programs stage his productions and theirs for nine straight years. Haywood is now developing a literacy enhancement pilot project that can be replicated to spark and interest in reading and writing a well as to assist in abating the spiraling literacy plunge. He wrote and self-published “Coota and the Magic Quilt” that has been read by over 3,000 youth and educators and more recently translated into Spanish. He self-published the second book, in a planned Coota Trilogy entitled “Coota and the Challenge”. Both books deal with the growing up experiences and dynamics of a young African American boy in the inner City of Boston.