Putting in work

Education, prevention, keys to combating gangs Paul Mazzola was walking home from The Rocket Club last August when a car pulled up and a man leaned out the window, showed a chrome-plated gun and demanded his wallet. Mazzola gave him $52 (all the money he had) and called 911 when he got home. The Asheville Police Department classified the robbery as “gang-related” and subsequently arrested two suspects, one 17 years old and the other 18. From July through December 2008 (during the first year the APD tracked gang-related

Dan and Dewayne interview on WFMU radio

Green Opportunities was in the spotlight in New York and New Jersey last week on WFMU, a listener-supported, non-commercial radio station. Dan and Dewayne give Douglas Rushkoff the scoop about Asheville GO on his program "The Media Squat," which describes itself as a "freeform, bottom-up, open source radio [program] looking towards similarly open source, bottom-up solutions to some of the problems engendered by our relentlessly top-down society." Listen to the entire interview here.
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The Green Scene

Creating jobs, fostering communityTwo days after President Obama signed the stimulus package into law, DeWayne Barton and Dan Leroy were in D.C. for the “Good Jobs, Green Jobs” conference. But the two men—co-founders of the Asheville Green Opportunity Corps—were not content with merely attending the event and eyeing the new funding possibilities. With help from Barton’s D.C. brother and nephews, they hauled tires, bicycles, TVs, beer bottles, discarded toys and other trash out of a neglected section of the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site. Such...
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You GO Delario!: Delario Cato of Asheville GO

“Delario really has a green thumb,” says Joan Engelhardt of Winter Green. She is supervising former Pisgah View Apartments resident Delario Cato during his apprenticeship with the new nonprofit which teaches people how to raise vegetables year-round.
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It's Getting Hot in Here

“My neighborhood’s crazy.” Waylon said, “there’s drugs, alcohol, violence, stolen motor vehicles, robbing, getting into porno—we’re trying to do whatever. This program,” he said, referring to Asheville Green Opportunities or Asheville GO, “makes it not that hard. “And,” he said, “we get paid.”