Project Success of Vermilion County hopes to use $30-thousand dollars in Community Development Block Grant money to help stem violence in Danville. Bill Pickett has the details…
Lucas Seilhymer is the CEO of Project Success…a program that helps some kids before and after school….
{Audio: ‘’What we want to do is take some of the Community Development Block Grant to focus in some specialized programming on after-school violence prevention. This is a program we feel like the kids who already serve with our Project Success programs in the city of Danville can really benefit from. This is going to include some specialized curriculum, some technology upgrades for some of our programs, as well as helping those kids maybe do some college visits and stuff like that.’’}
Seilhymer notes Project Success operates county-wide….
{Audio: ‘’We’re in 21 schools in 19 sites across Vermilion County. We operate after school, and some before-school programming to help kids with academic enrichment, life skills (and) other types of enrichment. And across the county we are serving 650 kids a day, a thousand unique kids a year.}
Seilhymer was asked why his group wants to target violence…
{Audio: ‘’Violence in general – not only locally – but just across the country and across the world, sometimes kids don’t really know what’s going on. They don’t know why it’s happening. And we want to be able to adapt to that locally, as well as explain in a positive way how we adapt and how we deal with things that are going on across the world.’’}
The Danville City Council’s Public Works Committee has already approved the request, and is recommending the full council also approve it. The City Council meets in its regular session Tuesday evening, September 21st. The meetings normally start at 6:00 p.m. but Tuesday’s meeting will begin at 5:30 because of plans that night to honor the seven plaintiffs in a 1987 Federal Voting Rights lawsuit. It led to a change in Danville’s form of government from a mayor and four commissioners to the current mayor-aldermen form.
