Is it possible to break down ideological walls and help disadvantaged kids in Colorado rise to their full potential? 

Ian Rowe not only believes it. He can prove it.

Rowe, a nationally respected educator, entrepreneur and author partnered with the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) to bring a fascinating two-day conference to Denver last week. The FREE Initiative argues we all need strong families, a faith community that points to a greater purpose, quality education and a commitment to work if we are to rise from above life’s circumstances and thrive.

This challenges the stale ideologies of left and right and charts a smarter, more hopeful course for human flourishing, particularly among young people of color from generationally disadvantaged communities. 

Family. Religion. Education. Entrepreneurship. It might be FREE but it’s not easy.

These four pillars, in Rowe’s view, must be coupled with personal agency. In fact, “Agency” is the title of his must-read book.

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“Agency” is an old-fashioned word with deep relevance in 21st century America. It is the basic concept you have power to shape your life, and to do the work to set yourself on the path to an independent life of meaning and purpose. 

Rowe, the son of Jamaican immigrants, brings real hope to troubled communities because he doesn’t get bogged down in the ideological ping-pong game between polar opposite diagnoses of the problem. 

On the progressive left exists the “blame the system” camp, a group that dominates discussions about poverty and opportunity in Colorado’s public square. They tell students they are powerless to rise because of systematic oppression which Rowe – who is Black – tags as “a modern-day form of mental enslavement by convincing young people of all races that they are trapped in a lower caste of society.”

It is a recipe for discouragement and despair to see others climbing up the mesa of life only to be told immovable forces are arrayed against you to even begin the climb.

This is wrong and cruel.

But it is equally cruel to “blame the victim,” as Rowe points out, which accuses young people of being “the architects of their own shortcomings.”  Your array of poor choices, or lack of initiative, are the root cause of your failure to launch. 

That’s why the FREE Initiative is spot on: teach young people to use their agency while surrounding them with supportive institutions.   

Rowe is neither a politician nor a theorist. He has street cred. For more than a decade, he established and ran public charter schools in New York’s South Bronx, a deeply distressed area. He shows, in the lives of individual students, how desperate life circumstances need not determine, or derail, the drive to a successful life. He recognizes this is exceedingly difficult, but eminently achievable.

I have long known what Rowe says to be true.   

In the early charter school movement in Philadelphia, in troubled neighborhoods, I was involved with supporting a charter school run by strong, no-nonsense-focused educators. They fought for those kids in a cultural war zone.

Some students arrived at that charter school because the Philadelphia School District said they were uneducatable or too violent or just a lost cause. 

One young woman told us she came there after the city school district expelled her because she stabbed a student to prevent him from raping her. Fortunately, the charter school was there as a life-saving oasis, helping her to step onto a path away from desperate choices and violent abuse.  

The day we met her, the headmaster said, “Tell them where you are going to school next year.”

“I’m going to Harvard, sir.”

That memory is nearly 30 years old, and it is as fresh as if it happened yesterday. It still brings tears. I wonder not only where she is today, but where she might have been without an inner-city charter school, passionate educators who believed in her – and her own agency.

In every heart there is an embedded will to rise, but institutions, and the people in them, must tell you, show you, that you can rise. It is not easy, nor guaranteed, but the formula is rooted in a fundamentally, non-ideological belief in basic human nature.

Kids in Colorado need to know they have agency.

Sean Duffy, a former deputy chief of staff to Gov. Bill Owens, is a communications and media relations strategist and ghostwriter based in the Denver area.