The Magic Begins for Steve Harvey's Disney's Dreamers Academy

A panel of distinguished judges read 3,000 essays from students across the country. One question on the application asked, "Who is a role model in your life and how have they inspired you?" One student's answer, Zachary G. from Clinton, Maryland, particularly stuck out to me. He answered,

"My father was my role model. He is deceased, but he had a great impact on my life. My father was a foster child, went to jail for rape. He was the first man in DC to get DNA testing and was freed and he pushed and pushed until he moved his family out of poverty. He and my mom became foster parents; my mom is still doing it now. Through all of my dad’s troubles, he stayed positive, never angry up until the day he passed. He taught me to keep trying no matter what."

Essence.com recently interviewed Steve Harvey discussing his partnership with Disney and why its important for our youth to fulfill their dreams. Snippets from the interview:

Essence.com: How did you get involved with Disney’s Dreamers Academy?

Steve Harvey: I’d been doing some business with Disney’s Vacation Club when they heard about my mentoring program. I used to mentor African American boys across the country. Now that I’m at WBLS in New York City, I invite a group of boys from different schools every Wednesday to sit and have lunch with me. We spend about 3 hours just talking about how to be successful in life. Disney heard about this and said, ‘Wow, we’re also trying to come up with a mentoring program.’ So they asked if I would partner with them on the Disney Dreamers Academy.

Essence.com: Why are you mentoring just boys?

S.H.: Because that’s where I believe the problem lies. I have daughters and I haven’t seen too many boys that I want to see them bring home. If we don’t start developing better boys, our women won’t have great choices to choose from. We have more men of college age institutionalized in prisons than we do in colleges, and that’s wrong. So if we don’t straighten these boys out, our family structure will continue to suffer. The women in our race can’t do any more then they have already done.

Essence.com: What difference do you think this experience is going to have on the students who were selected?

S.H.: I think it will make a big difference. I often say something that I’m always shot down for but I’m not going to stop saying it: There is nothing in a child’s life that is greater than their dream, not even their education. But when you say that, educators frown on you. Think about it…it’s the dreams that make a child even want to go to school. The reason we have such a high dropout rate is because kids are not taught to dream. I have talked to educators from Los Angeles to New York. If they would erase what they call study hall, which is a free period, and make it a requirement where kids just come to class to talk about their dreams and then we show them how to accomplish them, we could alleviate the dropout rate....

Read the entire interview here.

Related Post: The Disney Dreamers Academy

Sources: Disney Dreamer's Academy website, Essence.com