Finding their way

What happens when you ask a bunch of semi-ornery teenagers to set some goals, and then put a dumb obstacle in their way?

“Short term goal: do all my chores. Long term goal: stay clean. … Please make it!”

Blindfolded, Monique chucked a beanbag backwards over her shoulder, and it predictably missed the target basket. “Awww …”

“Short term: get off probation. Long term: get hella rich.” Maddy missed too, and Brandy piped in, “Now you’re gonna be a poor old woman with about 10 cats!”

On Tuesday mornings, Roger Jolliff’s small class from North Valley Community Day School comes to the Community Collaborative for Youth center, on the dead end off Cedar and Ninth, where Cedar runs into Little Chico Creek. CCY is hidden in one of those quirky little Chico corners that still feel very small-town—a tangle of creekside greenery, the sound of chickens somewhere across the way, and, incongruously, a train roaring past on tracks bordering the center’s small yard.

The North Valley students come to take part in one of CCY’s programs, Every Youth Included—a lively mix of creativity, games, theater and good old-fashioned nurturing designed to build life skills and encourage healthful choices and relationships.

On this Tuesday, the mood was agreeable. The eight kids in attendance were relaxed, jokey, glad to be outside and away from the usual classroom. But it’s not that easy to stand up and tell the world your hopes and dreams, especially when achieving them seems to have something to do with chucking a beanbag while blindfolded.

Brian’s turn came up: “Get into independent studies. Join the Marines.” Miss.

Chelsea: “Don’t get kicked outta the lovely Roger’s class this week. Get off probation.” Miss.

T: “Short term: get some smoke. Long term: Get rich and die.”

“Those aren’t good goals, T,” cut in the lovely Roger, no-nonsense. There’s an obvious rapport between Jolliff, who looks as straight-arrow as an Eagle Scout leader, and his charges, who have all crossed paths with the juvenile-justice system. But a joke goes only so far. While CCY facilitators Angelina Aviles and Kayla Fritz led the group in their goal-setting exercise, Jolliff stood apart, tossing off sidelong quips and setting straight the occasional inappropriate remark.

“Now let’s do it again,” said Aviles, 22, the kind of easygoing young adult who isn’t that far removed from being a teen herself, though she’s CCY’s program director and a Chico State graduate in anthropology. “Tell us your goals—or say them to yourself if you don’t want to say them out loud—and this time turn around and aim at the basket.”

“Get out of group home.”

“Stop running away.”

“Go to school every day.”

“Go to college.”

“Get along with my mom.”

A few beanbags made the basket, but most missed. “Why are you all standing 10 feet away?” asked Aviles. “Did I say you couldn’t just walk right up to the basket and chuck it in?”

“That would be cheating!” protested Brian. “Why?” countered Fritz, who at 17 is the youngest CCY facilitator, with a quiet intensity that shone like the blue streak in her hair. “Didn’t you just set up another obstacle for yourselves?”

“You can’t just walk up and get your goal!” “There’s no free ride.” “A goal is not just some little game to play.”

They’d tapped into strong feelings about goals and obstacles, and the goofy camaraderie of the game was instantly transformed into a surprisingly complex debate. Hard cases, hard knocks—these kids clearly expect nothing to be handed to them on a silver platter, but the game made the point that it doesn’t help to make hard luck any harder.

Most of the young people served by CCY have dropped out of the mainstream or never gained entry. Through family circumstances, behavior choices, psychological needs, the vagaries of fortune, or all of the above, their lives diverge in many ways from those of their teenaged contemporaries.

The students at North Valley Community Day School, which is run by the Butte County Office of Education for grades 7-12, have been referred there by county probation, by expulsion from the Chico, Paradise or Durham school districts, or even by parents at the ends of their ropes. Various CCY programs, which include a patchwork quilt of different classes provided by several affiliated nonprofits (see sidebar page 18), are offered in Chico’s alternative-education schools, in some Butte County and Oroville schools, and in Juvenile Hall.

Some CCY kids live in group homes or foster care, while others live with their families. Some may simply need to pick up a few extra credits at continuation school to complete their high school degrees, while others know more about juvie than JV.

Like any broad swath of middle- and high-schoolers, they’re a spectrum, but most of them have seen enough trouble of one kind or another—drugs, truancy, violence, gangs, family drama—to create a gulf between themselves and mainstream expectations and self-perceptions.

“The value of the CCY program,” explained Karen Abel, principal at North Valley, “is that it allows kids time to be with other kids and to problem-solve, not by adults telling them what to do and think, but by a self-discovery process that plays to their individual strengths. A lot of these kids need to take a good hard look at themselves so they can get out of blaming mode and take control of their own lives. And it serves them in a practical way: It helps them develop concrete goals like completing high school or getting back into their regular school.”

Abel was one of the first champions of the CCY program when she taught at Fair View, the Chico Unified School District’s continuation high school, where students who don’t succeed in the district’s main high schools get a chance to earn their diplomas in smaller classes and a more intimate environment. Abel helped CCY develop a precursor to the Every Youth Included program, which she implemented in a well-regarded after-school elective called Passages: Coming of Age in Today’s World.

The driving force behind CCY is founder and Executive Director Emily Alma, a veteran community activist who first came up with the vision of a youth project back in the 1980s, when she ran an environmental-education program up at Butte Meadows (if you were a Chico middle-schooler back then, chances are she helped you dissect an owl pellet or identify a manzanita).

Alma, 65, whose motherly round face is punctuated by sharp, funny, dark eyes, laughed when she recounted the original impetus: a particularly irresponsible batch of high-school students who served (or failed to serve) as Butte Meadows camp counselors, leading her to conclude, in her frustration, that what they needed was a classic coming-of-age quest.

“It emerged like a flash of light in a dream,” recalled Alma, with the sort of idealist fervor that gets things accomplished only when it’s merged with a formidable practical streak. She began to think about and talk about her vision of a self-discovery program for teenagers that linked environmental awareness, goals and challenges, and healthy introspection.

Her ideas percolated through a supportive network of educators, community leaders, and social service professionals, transforming over time from an environmental focus to a life-skills course aimed at the young people who need it most.

“Emily had her idea and the persistence to make it happen,” said Bernie Vigallon, director of alternative education for the CUSD and principal of Academy for Change, the district’s school for students who’ve been expelled from other district schools and/or been through the juvenile courts.

“Our community needs to support the people who support our kids. Emily and CCY look at each individual student as part of the community … as somebody we should embrace because they’re our own. I guess that’s part of her mother-nature thing. And she got this going because she won’t take no for an answer—she always wants to know why and why not.”

CCY began as, and remains, a symbiotic network of like-minded programs, a coalition that represents many of the under-represented in the Chico community.

“When we were designing the CCY program,” recalled Alma, “we did some very thorough needs assessments that brought in organizations reaching into different communities.”

Alma hooked up with African-Americans through NIA Learning Academy (an Afro-centric school that has since moved to the Washington, D.C., area) and with Chapmantown kids through T.E.A.M. Chapman. Stonewall Alliance Youth brought in GLBTQ kids (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and questioning). Focus on the Future (the CUSD program that eventually morphed into Academy for Change) introduced juvenile first offenders.

“All these programs,” Alma said, “and the programs we’ve linked up with since, share a common vision: We’re all trying to guide kids to build resiliency, to reduce violence, to reduce stereotyping and prejudice. We want to offer opportunities for young people to be creative; to provide tools for building healthy relationships; to have an outlook for present and future life—how about happy? How about connecting with the community, and the things that make life worthwhile?”

Through the Butte Meadows program, Alma was widely known in the environmental and educational communities, and her project got seed money and planning support from Chico’s Peace and Justice Center and the Butte Environmental Council. In 2001, her groundwork brought in a $15,000 grant from the North Valley Community Foundation to develop member programs. That gave CCY the bona fides to win a $100,000 planning and capacity-building grant from the California Endowment in 2001, followed up in 2003 with a $446,575 implementation grant for Every Youth Included.

But grants eventually run out, and Alma is, like all community activists, preoccupied with making next year’s ends meet even when she has this year covered. Contracts with school districts provide revenue to help cover staff salaries, rent, insurance and other costs, but CCY’s continued existence is dependent on further grants and individual donations.

“Nonprofits are struggling, and we all have to scratch each others’ backs to survive,” explained Hillary Tyree, a CCY board member and coordinator of SERV (Stopping the Existence of Relationship Violence), a domestic-violence program and drop-in teen center in downtown Chico. “What I admire about CCY is that it’s a preventive program—changing attitudes—not just a Band-Aid approach like a lot of social services. But Band-Aids get the funding.”

Scarce funding or not, that back-scratching is a positive thing in a tightly knit community.

For an outside observer, it’s hard to delineate and describe all of the CCY programs and affiliates, the client schools and bureaucracies, the agencies and funding sources. Pretty soon you’re tangled up in a jumble of acronyms and mission statements that all start to run together. But those mission-statement concepts that sound like buzzwords on paper—words like empowerment, resiliency, hope, discipline, creativity, communication—become real and powerful when they touch an individual’s life.

That’s the point. Facilitator and Office Manager Allyson Juers talked about the resistance a lot of teens first feel when they encounter introspective CCY models like Every Youth Included: “Our curriculum is set up to make the kids comfortable at first, to forge a bond and establish trust before we delve into the deep issues and pain in their lives. If we hit a nerve, they don’t say, ‘This is hurtful for me,’ they say, ‘Screw this’ and ‘This is stupid.’ It’s a coping mechanism. Sometimes they’ll show you one-on-one that you’re getting through in a way they’re afraid to show in the group. As long as they take something home to think about, that’s what counts.”

The facilitators all bring different strengths, talents and community bonds to CCY. Yolanda Young is African-American, a little older at 32 and more experienced; she wants to create a place like CCY herself someday. Hugo Gonzalez, 25—the only man in the group and CCY’s outreach director—is Guatemalan-American, the organization’s tech guy, and supremely good-natured. Juers, 28, was a single teen mother who struggled to put herself through Chico State, from which she will shortly graduate with a sociology degree. Fritz, a Butte College student, also works for HERE (Homeless Emergency Runaway Effort). Rachel Kinney, 24, having overcome many obstacles in her own life, feels a kinship with her client-kids.

The most senior are Lead Facilitator Jenny Leal, 21, who works mostly in Oroville at Juvenile Hall, where her great sense of humor must come in handy, and Aviles, whose smile could make the surliest of surly teens come out of her shell.

“We train our facilitators well,” said Alma, “but they have to start with skills to begin with. They have to be able to engage a group and work through all sorts of emotional bad weather. And they must believe in our mission. The young people who are drawn to work here, and who we’re drawn to hire, bring a lot of compassion from their own life experiences.”

Mondays at Fair View High School, Gonzalez and Kinney are implementing a new venture called Youth REP (Research, Evaluation and Planning). They’ve been working with Sherri Boone’s elective leadership class on a student life survey, a very nuts-and-bolts, hands-on approach to leadership.

Last spring’s leadership class designed the survey questions to find out how the student population was feeling since Fair View moved to its present campus on East Avenue. This fall, the new leadership students have been tabulating and analyzing their results and coming up with an action plan (bathroom conditions and lunchroom discontent topped the concerns).

They presented their findings to the entire school at an Oct. 5 assembly, in a well-received presentation complete with PowerPoint and speech. As school leaders, they accomplished a lot: They gave the student community a way to make their opinions heard, backed up with legitimate research; encouraged “buy-in” from other kids; and even got the administration to promise better bathroom conditions. Plus, they honed a bunch of math, writing, statistical-analysis and computer skills along the way. Boone hopes they can give the presentation in front of the CUSD school board.

Wednesdays at the CCY center, kids who live together in the Rock Creek Group Home come for their after-school Every Youth Included session. On a recent Wednesday, it was 4 p.m., and they were tired—they just wanted to veg out. Juers and Young took it easy on them, turning up the radio and letting them stare into space for a little while. But there was work to be done: They needed to finish painting CCY’s entry in the Chico Palio contest, a papier-mâché horse and carriage that had come out looking like … well, Sonny said cat, Charles said pig—it was a mystery mammal, but very loveable. Soon nearly every kid was engaged in mixing paint or braiding yarn for the mane and tail, and the few who remained aloof had, at least, a safe and quiet place to chill.

Thursday is CCY’s big day at Academy for Change. From 1-4, AFC kids take Open Arts, Drama, Every Youth Included or Beyond Violence workshops, rotating through the classes in six-week sessions.

In the art classroom, “Vig,” as Vigallon is called, looked on like a proud papa as students showed off two recent projects, both eye-poppers: a shooting-star mosaic representing the school logo, and a vivid star-shaped collage-assemblage with student names and portraits woven through. They’re sophisticated pieces, and no surprise—two of Chico’s most respected artists, painter Cynthia Schildhauer and painter/muralist David Sisk (aka Sisko) conduct Open Arts.

“The creative process is so engrossing,” said Schildhauer, “that for those few minutes that they really focus, they escape everything else. If they can get 15 or 20 minutes of peace in here, that’s worth it.”

The kids—generally the least likely demographic to say anything, much less anything complimentary—spoke warmly about art.

“The shooting star represents the future,” said Joe. “You only get one chance, so you better make the best of it.”

“The CCY art project was a great way to express ourselves,” said April, and Heather added, “Now we have a beautiful art project that will carry on and show who we are.”

In the drama class, Theater on the Fringe’s Suzanne Papini and Fritz coaxed an improv out of three guys who looked like they’d be more at home with hoops than stagecraft.

“Life is like a stage,” said Papini. “We act all the time. Here, you can act out anything you want safely, in character.”

Out on the blacktop yard, Aviles and Kinney were running their kids through an Every Youth Included specialty: the STD card game. They dealt out the cards, and the kids traded them, only to find out—too late—that the Ace meant HIV, the 10 chlamydia. A simple tree diagram starting with two hypothetical sex partners multiplied exponentially across a poster board, imparting a lesson in STD awareness topped only by the gruesome STD photos passed around: If it’s not treated, it looks like that. Yuck!

The Beyond Violence workshop was a tougher sell. The other classes engaged through movement and activity, but Beyond Violence required a level of attention and reflection that nervy 17-year-olds—and their elders, no doubt—would find challenging. Diane Suzuki runs the Beyond Violence Alliance, modeling the program after the Oakland’s Men’s Project and incorporating the teachings of Martin Luther King Jr. It aims to help kids understand the roots and effects of violence in the family and the community, and, judging by some of the sidelong remarks, it’s a topic well worth investigating. But this was Day One of the session, and the students were unruly, talking across the room, chucking stuff at each other, and being, you know, obnoxious teenagers.

Nevertheless, Suzuki and her co-presenter, Nancy Neidhardt, were anything but rattled. “It’s always like this at first,” explained Suzuki. She calmly asked her class for a little respect and just went on, unruffled and nonjudgmental, knowing from experience that every week these kids confronted tough issues was a victory.

A payoff came when Suzuki was drawing a roots-and-branches tree image representing the causes and effects of violence while students called out suggestions, some silly, some serious.

“Fear,” offered Micah.

“Is that a cause or an effect?”

“Both. Fear is greater than love.”

For the next few minutes, a real philosophical discussion scratched beneath the surface.

“High-risk kids don’t have a voice,” lamented Vigallon, talking about the obstacles in his students’ paths, “And they know they don’t.”

CCY seeks to redress that.

“We want them to know that who they are, their thoughts and complaints, their frustrations and dreams, are worthy to be heard and known and respected,” said Alma. “We want the experiences we provide to help them know that they are valued members of our community, and that they do have a voice that will be heard.”

Last spring, Rock Creek Group Home kids were asked for feedback on their Every Youth Included experiences. Among their comments:

“I think it helped me not to be scared to say my feelings and problems.”

“I learned about friendship and how to behave, and to shut up when other people are talking.”

“Everyone else fears, stresses, hurts like me.”

“I learned how strongly I feel about certain topics that relate to my life such as my sexuality and race.”

“I realized qualities about myself that I didn’t know I had.”

“People are a lot more than what you see on the outside.”

That’s CCY in a nutshell.