Four years ago, while volunteering at a weekend mentoring program for high school students in Newark, N.J., I got an education of a lifetime. During the mentoring sessions, many of the students often discussed what was going on in their lives. They talked about gang activity at their schools, drug problems in their neighborhoods and personal problems at home.

Most of the students were from struggling, poor or working-class communities. Their limited skills spoke volumes about the quality of education they were getting. Their unlimited dreams challenged us mentors to find ways to harness our young charges’ ambitions and channel them into something tangible. None of the stories were particularly unusual or shocking to me, after all I was a copy editor at The (Newark) Star-Ledger at the time. But getting to know the faces behind those stories, and seeing firsthand the impact they had on the teenagers’ lives, made the stories all the more real for me and gave them context. I began to believe that perhaps by helping others make that connection, especially those within and outside their communities with the power or ability to help bring change, I could possibly help facilitate collective solutions. This summer, the Ghetto America project begins telling these stories. We will be filming in Philadelphia, Pa., Greensboro, N.C., Baltimore, Md., and Washington, D.C.

This project gives a wider audience to the voiceless, providing a larger forum for disadvantaged urban and rural young people around the country to broadcast their plight, share solutions and, hopefully, destroy social marginalization.