The City of Orangeburg is teaming up with a nonprofit group to connect with the community through block parties and other programs. The effort’s called “Orangeburg ROSE,” with ROSE standing for “Raising Orangeburg Seeds of Excellence.” The city and Serve & Connect kicked off the effort Friday at the Adden Street Park.
“The ROSE initiative is really all about our young people,” Orangeburg City Administrator Sidney Evering II said. The ROSE initiative is designed to ensure that youth and communities are given equal opportunities to grow, prosper and thrive in their lives and particularly in Orangeburg, Evering said. Evering noted, “When we first started talking about this initiative, we talked about the rose that grew from concrete.
” He noted that the late hip-hop artist Tupac Shakur wrote the poem, “The Rose That Grew from Concrete.” “It’s basically about a rose that came up from the concrete, but instead of being impressed and marveling at the rose, a lot of people walked by the rose and were critical of it,” Evering said. “That’s an analogy for what we have here in Orangeburg and in similar communities,” Evering said.
“We have this concrete that stifles the growth of our rose. This concrete represents poverty. It’s hopelessness, it’s drug abuse, it’s just all of the things that can hold a community, all of the things that can hold young people down,” he said.
“What can we do to break that concrete to really give people hope, to g.