Jacobs, an 18-year-old who plans to double major in music and business at the University of Houston, is one of many students being helped through Aspiring Youth, a nonprofit organization led by John Meredith, a Tech graduate who chucked a law career to help kids in tough neighborhoods fight frustration, apathy and the lure of the streets.

The after-school volunteers Jacobs met at Ryan Middle School in Houston selected him as an intern in the Aspiring Youth office in that city, where he came in contact with an assortment of business leaders.

"John offered an opportunity for me to do an internship, working with computers, meeting different people, mentoring different kids at different Aspiring Youth places. It's pretty nice to give back to the kids who are in the same situation that I was in. It's pretty fun," Jacobs says.

Aspiring Youth focuses on at-risk middle schoolers, using the Houston school system's definition of "at risk." They're students living in an area where there is a high dropout rate, where a large percentage of kids need financial aid to buy breakfast or lunch at school, where there is a lot of illegal drug activity and where there are many single-parent households.

After graduating from Tech in 1985 with a master's degree in management and earning a law degree from Baylor University, Meredith settled into work in Houston as a commercial litigator.

After a few years on the job, Meredith says, one night stands out: He and a colleague were sitting in his office at the end of the workday. It was "one of those conversations when you have your feet up on the desk, talking about making the world a better place." They wondered how they could do more for Houston, especially its inner-city children. They wanted to help, but they didn't know how.

Two weeks later, Meredith got a phone call that changed his life.

A juvenile court judge had approached the leader of the city's Young Lawyers Association because he was seeing an alarming number of middle school children in his courtroom. The judge asked the lawyers group to find a way to give these kids a helping hand, to slap away the hands shoving them toward gangs and drugs.

The Young Lawyers Association turned to Meredith. He led a group of volunteers, all attorneys, who started programs at two Houston schools, then four. As the program spread to other Texas cities, Meredith set off to Harvard University, where he earned a master's degree in public administration and set up pilot projects in the Boston area based on Aspiring Youth.

When he returned to Texas in 1997, he became the group's full-time executive director. He hasn't had time to miss the income and prestige of his former career. Since he became executive director, Aspiring Youth has spread to 30 cities in 11 states. Although most of the work continues to be done by volunteers, Meredith now oversees a full-time staff of 10 and 50 to 60 part-timers.

Meredith says the time is right for the organization to spread beyond its association with lawyers - for example, he muses, engineers at a certain university in Atlanta would be welcomed with open arms at an Aspiring Youth program that meets just on the other side of the downtown expressway.

Already, Meredith, who grew up in Atlanta, has his parents working four days a week with about 30 children who gather at Walton Middle School in downtown Atlanta.

Meredith's father, James C. "Cham" Meredith, who earned a chemical engineering degree from Tech in 1955 and a master's in public health engineering, says he is glad for the chance to spend time with middle school kids.

"They can be molded more at that age than later," Cham Meredith says. "Before that, they're not quite old enough to work in a program like this. This is the ideal age to be influenced the most in sportsmanship, integrity, discipline and doing your homework."

©2002 Georgia Tech Alumni Association