What happens when ‘at-risk' youth reach for better lives?
Editor's note: This story is part of 'Hard Times,' a special report by The Republican on the challenge of healing from civic trauma.
She thought it was normal. Watching people work nonstop. Watching them take extra jobs to keep the lights on. Using candles when they couldn't.
'People who live their life worrying about where their next paycheck is going to come from,' said Janeyah Madera. 'People who worry about whether they have enough to pay the rent.'
Madera, a 17-year-old junior at Holyoke High School, watched teenagers drop out of school year after year. 'I thought everything was normal,' she said. 'I normalized it for so long.'
Until someone set her straight. While at Holyoke High, she met a teenager from Pa'lante Transformative Justice, a nonprofit with a mission to build 'youth power to heal and transform interpersonal harm and systemic injustices.'
'And they were like, 'No,'' Madera recalled while sitting with a friend at Pa'lante's Linden Street center in Holyoke. 'That's not the way things should be. I never knew. I just thought that's the way things work.'
At Pa'lante, she learned about the school-to-prison pipeline. 'The school-to-prison pipeline targets people who look like me,' said Madera, who was ready to drop out of school before she joined Pa'lante. 'I'm just really grateful I found Pa'lante when I did.'
Her friend Nichelle Rivera was sitting beside her on a couch in a second-floor room of Palante's Victorian home.
'I was a real quiet person, and Nichelle had to break me out of that,' she said, looking over at her friend. 'She used to come up to me, no matter how much I didn't want to talk, and be like, 'How you doing? You okay? What are you coloring? What are you reading?''
Eventually, Madera followed in Rivera's footsteps and became a peer leader at Pa'lante, helping more teenagers realize their potential. 'You're born with an endless amount of possibilities,' Madera said.
The name Pa'lante is a reference to the Young Lords, a group of young people of color, primarily Puerto Ricans, who worked to address racism, police injustice, poor health care and tenants' rights in the 1960s and '70s.
Inside Pa'lante's three-story home, inspirational murals decorate the wood-paneled walls. Pockets of young people talk and laugh, while others fiddle on their cellphones. In a large downstairs room, a group dances salsa while another group cooks in an upstairs kitchen and plays Nintendo video games on a big screen television.
Connecting local kids is not accidental.
'It's one of our main goals,' said Christopher Lora, a youth leadership coordinator. 'When we come together, we build power and we can use that power to transform systems of oppression.'
When asked about the hardships and trauma that young people experience living in urban poverty, Lora immediately brought up the school-to-prison pipeline. It's a system that pushes students out of schools and into prisons.
'With being pushed out comes different things,' he said. 'Because of being pushed out, the student has to find a way to make money.'
A study from the National Library of Medicine found that the school-to-prison pipeline traps adolescents in the criminal justice system.
Lora said schools use suspensions and 'emergency removals' to force certain students out of school and onto the streets. A federal report, 'Exploring the School-to-Prison Pipeline: How School Suspensions Influence Incarceration During Young Adulthood,' supports Lora's experience.
'Our findings demonstrated that youth who experienced a suspension between grades 7 and 12 experienced significantly higher odds of incarceration as young adults, relative to youth who were never suspended,' the report said.
Pa'lante fights back by showing up for local teenagers.
'We bring them in and, in a transformative way, we tailor our work to their needs,' Lora said.
Madera's friend, Nichelle Rivera, said Pa'lante is 'transformative' because it is inclusive. As a peer leader, she connects with each person who walks into Pa'lante's youth drop-in center daily.
Upstairs, there's a chill space they call the 'meta.'
'We are in touch with everybody in the meta,' she said. 'We try to make sure everybody's included in the space so that nobody's left out and left behind.'
Everyone is welcome.
'No matter where you're coming from or your background, your sexuality, your ethnicity, it doesn't matter,' Rivera said. 'We try to accept everybody.'
Rivera, who's 17, knows what many of her Holyoke peers are going through.
'I came from struggle after struggle thinking that life wouldn't get better,' she said.
When she was 10, her grandmother died and she and her mother lost their home. They bounced from shelter to shelter.
'My mother was working when she was in the shelter from nine to nine,' she said. 'It wasn't even a nine-to-five. I didn't see my mother for most of the day.'
That's why she looks up to her. 'When I think about transformative justice, I think of my mother,' she said.
In her story, Rivera finds strength and resilience.
'It's just amazing where I've come from to where I am now,' she said. 'The school-to-prison pipeline tries to catch me, but I just beat it down.'
She's proud. 'My story is powerful,' she said. 'My story needs to be heard.'
Kids who grow up in the system get judged fast, she said. People see them as 'bad,' she said, 'but that's not the truth.'
'Your story is powerful, too,' she said. 'You're amazing no matter where you come from.'
Such affirmations changed Madera, Rivera's friend. 'I thought school wasn't for me,' she said. 'I thought I'm never gonna get anywhere. I was like, 'Who am I? I'm nobody.''
But that started to change when Madera found Pa'lante.
'I have a community of people here that I can lean on for help,' she said.
That connection changed how she saw everything.
'When I joined, they taught me that I am somebody,' she said. 'That if I want to make a change, I can do it. And if I want to go to college, I can do it. And if I want to graduate, I can do it. I have power and I am amazing.'
Read the original article on MassLive.
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