Latest news with #Pa'lante's
Yahoo
25-05-2025
- Yahoo
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.
Yahoo
02-05-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Grant boosts Pa'lante's fight against gun violence
HOLYOKE — You've probably heard of mindfulness. But what about Mindful Rage? It's a new program in Holyoke that transforms the angst and anger of young people into a creative force for introspection, change and justice, all for the good of the community. Pa'lante Transformative Justice — on a mission to help young people become leaders — doesn't want the teens of today to stew in isolation and anger. The human service agency is now looking to hire a new clinical director to both offer culturally sensitive therapy and oversee the Mindful Rage program. Designed by and for youth of color, the program is a creative- and activist-based alternative to traditional anger management courses assigned by courts. 'While there's a lot to be mad at when you look around and see the state of our society, you don't want your anger to burn you or the people closest to you. So how do you channel that anger into art, activism, change-making, and moving yourself and your community forward?' said Danielle Hayes, Pa'lante's development and communications director. Pa'lante was among 10 organizations in Massachusetts awarded a portion of a $1 million grant from Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell in April. The funding is aimed at developing innovative public health approaches — like the Mindful Rage program — to prevent gun violence. With the funding, Pa'lante is partnering with Multicultural Clinical Services in Amherst, where the providers are all people of color who understand how society affects mental health, Hayes said. 'Instead of trying to work with young people to cope with the current conditions, there's also a broader understanding ... that the conditions that folks are existing in can impact their well-being. Part of what we do here is trying to change the conditions,' she said. The Mindful Rage program was developed as part of a youth action research project two years ago. This year, the program has held four series for court-involved and other youth seeking to manage their anger, Hayes said. The program incorporates reflective art and studies the work of various activists and change-makers who have led social movements. In addition to exploring the legacy of the Young Lords and the Black Panthers, groups that turned their anger into political action, she said. Participants also have opportunities to write, reflect and journal. They study the work of artists like Dee Nichols — who created 'The Mirror Casket' after the murder of Mike Brown on Aug. 9, 2014, by a Ferguson, Missouri, police officer — as a way to use contemporary art for social change, she said. Pa'lante offers sessions after school and on Saturdays, with more sessions planned for this summer. Each session is facilitated by a young person alongside one of Pa'lante's alumni staff. The grant will not only strengthen Pa'lante's efforts to prevent violence and support youth in staying off the streets, but it also will help youth 'come together to build power, create joy, and fight for the communities and world they deserve,' said Luke Midnight-Woodward, the co-executive director, in a statement. This year, Pa'lante's young people are most passionate about building coalitions with other youth and organizations across Massachusetts, Hayes said. The group supports the Raise the Age Act, which aims to raise the juvenile age to 21. 'Research shows that young people's brains aren't fully developed until 25, and recidivism significantly decreases after age 21,' Hayes said. 'There's an opportunity to give young people another chance, more access to education, mental health support, and resources that are available in the juvenile system that are not in the adult system.' Young people aged 18 or 19 who end up in adult facilities are vulnerable 'because of who and what they are exposed to,' she said. Often, young people struggle to access counselors and mental health support, so the youth leaders at Pa'lante are advocating for 'counselors, not cops,' Hayes said. This initiative aims to reallocate funding from school resource officers to hire more counselors. These counselors should reflect the identities of the young people, be well-paid and have relevant experience, she said. 'The turnover is so high at some school-based clinics that young people pour their hearts out in four to six sessions, only to find their counselor gone. They feel like they don't matter,' Hayes said. A young person told her recently, 'I only saw my therapist twice, because I know that people are temporary.' 'That's part of what we want to do differently here and have continuity of adults and young people,' she said. Over 50% of Pa'lante's staff are alumni. Its board also is composed of more than 50% alumni and youth. 'The program aims to have youth leadership at every level of the organization to guide the ship,' she said. 'So, there's a real weaving together of intergenerational community,' Hayes said. 'If you're not going to be a leader one day in the future, you're a leader right now.' Read the original article on MassLive.
