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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Sister Eileen McNerney

Taller San Jose
Purpose Prize Fellow 2008

Helping high-risk youth restructure their lives, finish school, and develop marketable skills.

In 1992, Sister Eileen McNerney was living with three other nuns in gang-ridden Santa Ana, CA. One night she heard gunshots and then a mother crying over the body of her son, the second child she had lost to gang violence. McNerney resolved then and there to find a way to stem the tide of youth violence in a poor immigrant neighborhood plagued by a 50 percent high school dropout rate. McNerney decided the biggest obstacle to young people’s success was failure to secure and hold jobs. In 1995, at age 56, she launched Taller San Jose (St. Joseph’s Workshop) to offer training, counseling, legal help and job placement to high-risk young adults so they can restructure their lives, finish high school and develop marketable skills. More than 4,000 Santa Ana area young people have gone through Taller San Jose’s office skills academy, medical careers program or residential construction program, using support services such as mentoring, legal assistance, and job placement. Of graduates who have previously been incarcerated, 92 percent have not been re-arrested. 86 percent have moved on to full-time employment or community college. “I realized that I had had many privileges in my life and that the lives of these young people were certainly as important to them as my life had been to me. I really couldn’t bear to live there and be passive to the situation.”