The black male working Academy has been helping young men in Lexington for almost 20 years.

Now they have a new partnership with Jubilee Jobs.

The goal is to help participants find new ways to better Lexington and to join the workforce.

The BMW Academy is a nonprofit community program whose mission is to educate, motivate and activate the potential for excellence that lies within every African-American male.

This program started in 2005 with 40 boys.

We meet every Saturday.

Different age groups every first and third Saturdays.

Middle school, young people, second and fourth is high school and then elementary meets on the second Saturday of every month.

We also provide tutoring every Tuesday for our young man because that's a part of closing that academic achievement gap.

It's helping them with tutoring so that they can be successful.

And we have a little over 400 that are enrolled for this school year.

The Innovate to Elevate Grant is a partnership between BMW and Jubilee Jobs.

That grant was written to help our young men to be exposed to careers rather than jobs.

Because when you have a career that's long term that you can be successful in that career.

And so one of the highlights of this grant is that we have these goggles, these special goggles that have over 100 different careers on there.

You know, everybody's into all the technology and everything.

And so they can explore all these careers using these goggles.

And then the other partnership that has been awesome is that here in Lexington, we have an excellent Chamber of commerce and every year the Chamber of Commerce take takes all the business people, educational people, and they take a trip to another city to learn about that city, to get best practices.

How can it impact Lexington to make us a better city?

So a part of this grant is that we get to take 40 of our juniors and seniors on a youth chamber trip where they go to another city.

They meet with city leaders.

They meet with educational leaders.

They meet with all these different people to learn about that city.

And then they come back and report to the mayor and her officials.

They report to our superintendent.

And so they report to the chamber and tell their experiences and what they learned about that city.

The grant from the Walton Foundation through Bluegrass Community Foundation is for two years and provided us with a data data group that is measuring of the different like asked scores, their grades, how many of them are in dual credit classes versus AP classes?

Just looking at the overall data.

Also, Jubilee Jobs helps them to get a part time job.

And so we look at how long they were on the job, how they were successful on the job.

And so we're we're creating a whole new workforce that we hope will stay here.

Lexington, Kentucky.