Street Soldier: Dr. Joe Marshall
 Dr. Joseph E. Marshall, Jr. is the Executive Director and Co-founder of Omega Boys Club, a violence prevention organization that emphasizes academic achievement and noninvolvement with drugs. Through this organization, founded in March of 1987, Marshall has helped send more than 140 young men and women to college. These students are supported by the Omega Boys Club Scholarship Fund. To date, 63 Omegas have graduated from college.
With a growing list of success stories, the Omega Boys Club continues to receive national acclaim. Marshall, staff and members of the club have been profiled in the New Yorker Magazine, People Magazine, the New York Times Magazine, the Los Angeles Times Magazine, Essence Magazine, CNN, the Disney Channel, CBS Evening News, McNeil Lehrer Report, the Oprah Winfrey Show and the VIBE Magazine Television Show.
In 1990, Marshall was honored at the White House for his success in fighting drugs and crime in his community and he currently serves on the Advisory Board for the Community Violence Prevention Program at the Harvard School for Public Health. In March 1997, Marshall received a
bipartisan salute from the United States Congress when presented with the Freedom Works Award by House of Representatives Majority Leader, Richard K. Armey, Republican of Texas and seconded by California Democrats Ron Dellumsand Nancy Pelosi.
Marshall is the recipient of many other awards including a 1994 Fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, a 1994 Leadership Award from the Children's Defense Fund, and the 1996 Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Award from the National Education Association. Along with Denzel Washington, Quincy Jones, Spike Lee, Rev. Jesse Jackson, Robert Moses, Eddie Murphy and Benjamin Carson, MD, Joseph Marshall received the Essence Award in April 1994, honoring African American Men.
In addition to his work with Omega Boys Club, Marshall hosts the syndicated violence prevention radio talk show, "Street Soldiers". The Show is a call-in talk program for youth to speak about and receive solutions to the most pressing problems confronting their communities: crime, gang violence, teenage pregnancy and drugs. The show has been hailed by the New Yorker Magazine as a "model for how the entertainment industry can come to terms with violence.
"Marshall is the author of the best-selling book Street Soldier, One Man's Struggle to Save a Generation, One Life at a Time, (Delacorte Press, May 1996) and he and the club are the subject of a documentary on violence prevention entitled Street Soldiers, which aired on public television stations across America in the Spring of 1997.
Joseph Marshall received his bachelor's degree in both Political Science and Sociology from the University of San Francisco, his MA in Education from San Francisco State University and his Ph.D. in Psychology from the Wright Institute in Berkeley, CA. He is currently on leave from the San Francisco Unified School District where he was employed as a teacher and administrator for twenty-five years.
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