For excerpts from a WKCD interview with Smith about the TryUMF program,
click here.

Excerpts from Darrick Smith's May 2004 speech to Oakland's All-City Council, an advisory group of 40 student leaders from six of the city's high schools.

Use this opportunity to do something you actually want to do, as opposed to doing something that somebody else has done. Some of you might be in here to help your college applications, some of you guys might be in here because it's a good way of getting out of school for a couple of periods. And that's fine—I have my own views on why missing school isn't the worst thing all the time. But I will say this: use this opportunity to challenge the school district a little bit, to do things that are a little bit unconventional. Use it to challenge yourself. Use it well.

Because there's cats that don't come to these meetings who have great ideas but they're too scared to come and they're not plugged into the system. Then there's cats that come to these meetings because their teachers think they're leaders because they get good grades and keep their mouths shut. Well, that's not leadership either. Getting good grades, keeping your mouth shut, that's not good leadership.

Leadership is knowing when to speak and what to say. See, you can speak and have nothing to say. Youth voice—what good is youth voice if you don't have something important to say? "We want youth voice!" "Well all right, what do you want?" "I don't know, man! Oh-you all need to get us cleaner bathrooms!" You all can't clean your own bathrooms? Oh, no! Well, there you go. "We need tutors!" Those who have 2,000 kids that go to your school, can't you all tutor each other? Oh, no, man! All right, so then you start to see that there's a gap, there's a big gap in this leadership issue. It involves understanding what leadership really means and what it really takes. Cleaner bathrooms. Tutors. You can do better than that.

... When you're thinking of why you come here, don't think of why adults come to meetings ("Oh I had a meeting with this person." "Oh, you must have got some things done!" "Yeah, I had a meeting!") In the place you come from, you can't afford to have meetings for the sake of having meetings. You've got to get down to business, plain and simple. And the first thing on your agenda should be the stuff that you all face in school daily. You've got to understand this. Good—meaning folks may come to these All-City Council meetings and tell you how to get engaged in civic action. How to be youth leaders. Conferences, workshops, public speaking skills, etc. Those things are important, okay. But your civic action has got to start on your own campus, with the cats around you who threaten your future every day.

Take trespassers. You all got trespassers who didn't graduate from your school, but they come on campus to cause trouble. They can't stay away—even though when they were going to your school, they didn't want to go there. They prey upon you all, and they prey upon each other. Cats get jumped, girls ain't safe, boys ain't safe, teachers ain't safe. I mean, it's crazy. You got to be the student body to get on that.

You want better teachers, you say? If you want better teachers, students have got to quit running the good ones away. 'Cause you got good teachers. But how do you think they feel coming to school only to have some kid cuss them out, threaten them, go through their purse? You got to be the student body to get on that.

Cats come to school drunk and high, you gotta do something about it. You can't have cats acting like it's a party. This is a school, man. Sexual harassment, don't be all up on girls and then come here and talk about it!

Whether you like it or not, it's on you. Either you can not take responsibility, and let things go the way they are, and keep complaining—or you can do something about it and try and improve things. But what you don't want to do is have your title, Student Leader, just be an empty title.

... There's a quote from Braveheart: "Men don't follow titles, they follow courage." And the one thing you don't see a lot of in Oakland is courage. I never met so many weak knees in my life. It is so sad 'cause they certainly try to dress the part. But a thug ain't nothing but a slave with a weapon. When you're a thug nobody else [at school] is scared of you, really, the only people scared of you are the people in the community. You're only preying on your own folks. That's not real power. Real power is saying no to this intimidation.

So there it is. Cats are walking around our schools scared—scared to read, scared to do math, scared to go to class, scared to be good, scared to have courage, scared to shake somebody's hand, scared to smile, scared to get off the drugs, scared to stop dealing drugs, scared to find out that they're really somebody different, scared to find out that their mama was wrong about them when she said they wasn't worth nothing, scared to realize they're turning into their daddy already and they don't want to. It's time to put an end to the fear. It's time to stand up straight, to stand up. It's time to say, "Look, I'm tired of this," and boom, get it together. You all represent, what, 14,000 high schoolers? Do something with it please, all right? Good.

Excerpts from a WKCD interview with Smith about the TryUMF program

There are six original principles behind TryUMF. The first one is representation, the second is voice in action, the third is understanding stereotypes, the fourth is clarity. The fifth one is called GIT vision (Goals in Sight and Thought) and requires some explanation. GIT is about the different forms of a person's vision—their goals, their ability to see certain things (especially seeing beneath the surface), their analytical ability and insight, their ability to put together in their minds an understanding of people's thought patterns so that they can anticipate their movements.

GIT vision is especially important when it comes to preventing things, preventing violence with what we call the power of influence. When [TryUMF] students have friends that commit violent acts or things that can lead to any type of negative effect on their lives, when they have friends that do these things, when they understand their friends' thought patterns, they can actually help prevent their friends from being involved in violent activities because they can intervene before it gets to such an intense level.

The sixth principle is fuel. Fuel is about a person's ability to convert rage back into raw energy that can then be channeled into positive things—and become fuel. When you're asking students to use these other five principles and, say, go all the way up to where they're representing their family, and they're representing their city and their ethnicity and their gender and all these different parts of their identity, the only way they're going to have the energy to do all this is if they pull from deep inside themselves. Since most of our students experience some form of rage or hostility or anger at whatever situation they're in on any given day, we try and teach them why and how they should channel that energy into things more positive.

...I don't believe we've created a program that makes students into something that they're not already. Rather, we try to restore students, like restoring an old '66 Mustang that was tight when it came off the lot but then became rubble with all it went through. We try to restore it and shine it back up and then maintain it. So we don't create great students. Students are great when they come to us. We just try to keep them that way through the often-destructive process that is high school.

...I hope my students will try and change the system, but it's their decision. We're an empowerment program—not a fraternity or some type of special club where you have to be popular to be in it. We're about trying to give students the proper information, enough of a theoretical foundation where they can grow to be better decision makers. Then, if they decide they want to make change, they'll be better prepared on how to do it, and most importantly, they'll have the courage that oppression tries to strip from people, they'll have the courage to go out and give it a shot.

So yes, I would want them to make change if they saw it necessary. But if they just want to go out and get a job and be the first person in their family to graduate from college and raise a good family and not abuse their children or abuse their wives or husbands or partners, then that's pretty damn good!