Urban League

MLive.com's Printer-Friendly Page: "Imagine Muskegon without league's help
Friday, April 15, 2005By Clayton Hardiman
CHRONICLE STAFF WRITER
Every Christmas, we're treated to the nightmare scene in the sentimental classic film 'It's a Wonderful Life,' where George Bailey, desperate and suicidal, is escorted through the horrific mess the world would have become if he had never been born.
Today, we in Muskegon are forced to envision a similar scenario: Life without the Urban League.
In the film, George's idyllic hometown Bedford Falls has become a garish Babylon of vice and corruption. Every life George would have touched has been transformed for the worse.
The people he would have known are all suspicious, hostile and joyless. Some are insane or dead.
'You've been given a great gift, George,' his odd little guardian angel tells him, 'a chance to see what the world would be like without you.'
Some gifts, it seems, are almost more than we can handle.
Now we've been asked to imagine such a gift in real life. We have to envision Muskegon the last 55 years minus a proliferation of programs for employment assistance, education and health awareness.
We are asked to envision a Muskegon without youth employment training. We're asked to envision a Muskegon without sickle cell counseling, hypertension screening, home mortgage education and advocacy for the marginalized.
We are asked to envision a Muskegon without an Urban League.
All of this is a tremendous leap of the imagination -- not because losing those programs seems so unlikely but because it already seems so real.
Most of those programs have already disappeared, largely because of a financial crisis that has cost the non-profit community service agency most of its staff and now threatens its fu"