Nine times a year, cohorts of young people from San Jose and San Francisco pile into vans and head out for the fresh air and redwood-dotted forests of nearby Half Moon Bay. These are city kids, bonded by a shared experience of growing up in urban centers. But something much darker that bonds them, too. Each child has been affected by abuse, neglect or some other traumatic experience. Their destination: an animal sanctuary called Wildmind, where they’ll begin the healing process by learning and developing coping skills.
But on this three-acre sanctuary, humans aren’t the teachers. Animals are.
A homeless boy might be empowered by Luna, a one-eyed great horned owl that was hit by a car. Or a girl who’s spent time in the juvenile justice system might learn lessons about trust through the tales of a red fox named Inali, found abandoned after a storm.
It’s all part of the at-risk youth program at Wildmind, which houses more than 50 non-releasable wild animals that were rescued after being abused, injured or abandoned. Founded in 1980, the nonprofit has a singular focus on educating people of all stripes on environmental issues and the benefits of connecting with nature through animals. But for the marginalized youth who walk through its doors, it’s also a place to build social, emotional and life skills rooted in the animals’ stories.
Many of the teens who take part in the program come from the foster care and juvenile justice systems. They’re referred to Wildmind by shelters, youth agencies or their schools. Once a month for nine months, groups of 10 to 15 teens with troubled pasts meet at Wildmind’s sprawling Half Moon Bay facility. They start their day outside with a healing circle, where they’ll reflect on their feelings and soak up the nature around them.
Next come the animals — or as they’re called here, “wild teachers.” Lola, a red-tailed boa, might “share” why she sheds her skin every month, driving home the point that it’s important to shed negative memories in order to grow. Luna, the great horned owl, might “tell” a story about losing her mother but gaining support from others. There’s also Suka, an Arctic fox; George, a tamandua; Penny, a porcupine; Tundra, a snowy owl; and dozens of other animals, all of which have stories to share that mirror the kids’ experiences.
“The animals provide examples of surviving, overcoming obstacles and adapting to their environments, and that’s really what it’s all about for young people in crisis,” said Chris Kelley, the executive director of Wildmind.
Over the course of the program, the teens work on a group project, usually helping with construction on one of the animal’s habitats. The group typically ends their day with a hike or walk around the property.
“They get ideas about how to cope with their daily struggles and come through the other end with hope for the future,” Kelley told NationSwell.
https://www.instagram.com/p/ByZF3omgCXJ/
The story of Wildmind goes back nearly four decades ago when Steve Karlin, an environmental educator, opened a sanctuary that encouraged children to connect with nature. The at-risk youth program, which has helped around 2,500 troubled teens, was added in 2001. All in all, Wildmind has brought science and environmental literacy to more than 8 million students.
Jen Motroni, a wildlife educator, said it’s incredible to watch the kids open up over the months. People who would have never crossed paths create lifelong friendships and learn as much from each others’ challenges as they do from their animal teachers.
“They have this idea of what’s going to happen, and then all of that gets broken down,” she told NationSwell. “Many times they open up to us about the abuses and the trials and tribulations they go through.”
Motroni, who has worked at Wildmind for 18 years and with the at-risk program for three, has heard the kids describe all sorts of family challenges, from parents who have been deported or struggle with addiction to fathers who have abandoned their family.
“I have learned so much from these kids,” she said. “Everybody has their own story and you never know what someone has gone through.”
Kelley stressed the dual nature of the program. “It was developed to not only include the animals and the stories around the animals, but to provide young people a forum for opening up, for trusting people, for sharing their feelings,” he said. “Wildmind creates a safe space for them to do that.”
More: This Kentucky Couple Gives Animals a Place to Heal
Tag: at-risk youth
Restorative Justice Programs That Work
This past July, two men were brutally beaten while heading back to their hotel in New Orleans’ French Quarter. Four men were charged with the attack, but instead of pushing for a harsh jail sentence, the two victims proposed something else: a face-to-face meeting with the perpetrators.
The idea is based on a process called restorative justice. In a country where criminal justice often involves harsh penalties like jail time and steep fines, restorative justice asks everyone impacted by a conflict or a crime to develop a shared understanding of both its root causes and effects. Restorative justice considers the harm done and strives for agreement from all concerned parties on how to make amends.
In the U.S., restorative justice takes a number of forms. In many cases, offenders and victims face one another and discuss the reasons underpinning a crime and also work on potential solutions. But other models of restorative justice might include roundtable discussions or community involvement.
And it’s not just for courts: Restorative justice programs are also being used in schools to keep students from being suspended, which many say is ineffective and more like a vacation than anything particularly edifying.
Here are a few examples of restorative justice programs around the nation.
A Jury of Your (Teen) Peers
In the isolated waterfront neighborhood of Red Hook, in Brooklyn, teenagers are trained for 30 hours before being given an opportunity to help fellow teens, as part of a program administered by the Center for Court Innovation in New York.
For offenders between the ages of 10 and 18, low-level offenses such as bullying, assault or theft — cases that could easily land in a family or criminal court — are heard by a youth judge, a peer jury, a tribunal, an adult judge or some combination therein.
While the model is a flexible one, the end goals are much the same. According to the court’s training manual, “Youths have a primary role in presenting and hearing cases and the youth court’s fundamental approach should be restorative in nature, focusing on positive peer interactions, allowing the respondent to redress any harm done to the community and providing opportunities for positive youth development for both members and respondents.”
The success of the program has led to the introduction of youth courts in every NYC borough. Mayor Bill de Blasio endorses the program. “Young people must have confidence in the criminal justice system,” he said in a recent press release. “That starts by understanding how it works and by seeing themselves as a part of the administration of justice.”
A “Whole School” Approach
Three years ago, in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, a young black student threw Skittles at another student, landing him in jail.
His arrest was just one of many such incidents within the Jefferson Parish public school system that penalized black youth more frequently and more severely than their white peers, and it resulted in a complaint filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center against the school district.
As a result of the arrest and subsequent national attention, the school district decided to implement a new discipline plan featuring restorative justice, where students have the right to request a restorative circle before they are suspended. This is called a “whole school” approach, where anyone who is impacted by an incident — teachers, students and even parents — sit in a circle and express themselves in a nonjudgmental forum. At the end, participants come up with a way to address the problem or harm the incident caused.
At a school in Marrero, a city inside Jefferson Parish, suspensions in one school dropped by 56 percent, according to CityLab. Other schools in the district that have embraced a similar approach have also seen declines in suspension rates.
Once Offenders, Now Volunteers
Instead of locking up bullies, why not try talking to them instead?
That’s the goal of L.A.’s Teen Court, an intervention program which provides selected juvenile offenders with the opportunity to be questioned, judged and sentenced by a jury of their peers.
David S. Wesley, presiding judge for the Los Angeles Superior Court, thinks that having youth offenders plead their case to a jury of their peers, is a much more effective way of preventing future skirmishes with the law than traditional punitive measures.
“Punishment was not punishment,” Wesley said in a Center for Court Innovation podcast, explaining the basics of the court’s SHADES (Stop Hate and Delinquency by Empowering Students) restorative justice program. “It was what we could do to make sure the minor [didn’t] get in trouble again.”
The Teen Court approach differs from that of New York’s Center for Court Innovation, where the victim of the crime might be involved in the restorative justice process. But both models appear to be effective.
“We know anecdotally that our recidivism rates are very, very low,” Wesley said. “What ends up happening is that after their [sentencing], they come back [and volunteer as jurors].”
Men As Peacemakers
It’s estimated that one in three women have experienced some form of violence by a partner in the U.S., and one in four have been severely abused by a significant other.
And despite the fact that domestic violence against women is overwhelmingly perpetrated by men, many men do nothing to stop it.
That’s the goal of Men As Peacemakers: to reframe the narrative of healthy male behavior for youth offenders.
The Duluth, Minnesota-based nonprofit focuses its efforts on reducing commercial sexual exploitation and on domestic violence restorative programs. The group uses a “circle process,” rooted in traditional practices of Native American tribes, in helping facilitate discussions about problems with race, equity and education.
According to Men As Peacemakers, the purpose of their restorative justice program is to give youths a positive male role model to follow and “to acknowledge that [abuse] is a male problem.”
A Prison Sits Empty. A Nonprofit Moves In
As a social worker accustomed to prodding the minds of adjudicated youth in the juvenile justice system, Noran Sanford has long been an inquisitive kind of guy. So when he discovered that six prisons had closed within a 50-mile radius of his home in rural Laurinburg, N.C., including one in the nearby town of Wagram, he began asking questions. Lots of them. “It was in that moment that I began putting together the idea that somebody should do something with these large sites,” Sanford says.
Enter the concept behind GrowingChange. The organization launched in 2011 to help reform and empower young ex-offenders, some barely into their teens, as they work to turn the abandoned prison in Wagram into a community farm and education center. The first group of 12 participants recruited by Sanford had all been arrested, expelled from school and kicked out of their homes — a combination of risk factors that Sanford calls the “unholy trinity,” especially when living in one of North Carolina’s poorest counties.
The Wagram site, which partially opened to the public for tours in October, has worked with 18 formerly incarcerated youth since its inception, with seven active participants today. The group was able to secure the property from the state’s Department of Public Safety, who agreed to donate the land after Sanford and two of his youth leaders pitched the idea. Sanford hopes they will eventually be able to sell the soil amendments and organic produce they’ve cultivated. So far, participants have grown food for needy local families, and are working to repurpose jail cells into aquaponics tanks and guard towers into climbing walls, among other initiatives. GrowingChange also provides intensive group therapy for its youth leaders.
Analyzed over a three-year period, the prison-to-farm program was 92 percent effective in preventing recidivism among participants, Sanford says.
As the program has matured, so has its group of original participants, some of whom have stayed on to act as mentors to new recruits. Other young ex-offenders have been working to expand GrowingChange’s reach with a graphic-novel series, called Prison Flip Comics, that chronicles their troubled past; the goal is to use the comics as a learning tool distributed throughout North Carolina’s system of juvenile justice offices.
There are also teens who have embraced a more public-facing role, speaking at outside events and otherwise “sharing their stories about a personal experience of change,” says Simon Stumpf of Ashoka, which awarded Sanford a fellowship last year for his social entrepreneurship. Ashoka also provided funds to help scale GrowingChange. Sanford’s long-term goals include flipping 25 former prisons by 2025; currently, he estimates around 300 prisons sit empty across the U.S.
Despite GrowingChange’s small number of participants, other organizations have taken notice, reaching out from places as far away as the Netherlands, where Sanford traveled to present his model. And students from schools including the University of North Carolina at Pembroke and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have helped in areas like designing site plans and mapping the area with 3-D technology to share with the public what the site — which will eventually include housing for veterans and a counseling center — will look like once fully completed.
Sanford hopes to inspire prison authorities, government leaders, nonprofits, universities, foundations and others to think differently about unused prisons, taking an open-sourced approach by sharing what has, and hasn’t, worked at the Wagram facility. And that has him dreaming big.
“Our hope is to create a federated system of independent sites,” he says.
The Job-Training Program Giving City Kids a Reason to Hope
As urban areas across the nation experience renewal and transformation, Camden, N.J., is at the beginning of its renaissance.
The city — once known as America’s most dangerous — has been experiencing dramatic decreases in gun crime and violence, namely an 80 percent reduction in homicides during the first three months of 2017. That’s good news for Camden, which has also become a testing ground for tech nonprofits that want to help beleaguered youth find their way out of neighborhoods riddled with gang violence and into well-paying tech jobs.
But for Camden’s young residents, an increase in opportunity might not necessarily mean a better economic future.
“We had seen too many times in Camden, programs that had trained young people the same way, the same old skills, the same old methodology. Our young people needed something different,” says Dan Rhoton, executive director for Hopeworks ‘N Camden. “Our young people needed training, they needed healing, so that they could get a career that not only gave them a pathway to the future, but offered them sustainable opportunities now.”
Other nonprofits work to get minority students or young girls interested in tech jobs, but Rhoton says that the biggest challenge most of those organizations face isn’t getting kids interested — it’s that they don’t address the trauma that comes along with poverty or exposure to violence.
By using therapy as a means to address deep issues that can affect work ethic and personal integrity, Hopeworks has been successful in providing a steady stream of quality graduates that are career-focused and mentally prepared for work.
“Our young people have been hurt. Their legs have been broken, and yet we put them at the starting line with everyone else and tell them to run,” says Rhoton. “When they struggle, when they fall over, what too many programs do is they say, ‘Try harder,’ or they say, ‘You’re not motivated.’ If my leg is broken, motivation is not the issue — healing is.”
Hopeworks began 17 years ago under the guidance of three faith-based community leaders that “looked out on the streets and saw young people with no dreams, saw young people with no opportunities,” says Rhoton. The program was meant to address some of the biggest challenges in Camden at the time: getting teens from the tough streets of one of America’s most challenging and economically poor cities into more fulfilling careers in tech.
With a background working at detention centers and bringing education to those formerly incarcerated, Rhoton came to Hopeworks in 2012. At the time, the organization was experiencing problems, namely that it was only seeing a 10 percent success rate.
“We were bad at our job,” he says, adding that the low success rate was the catalyst for Hopeworks to focus on personal issues, such as abuse or neglect that can hamper a student’s ability to learn. “We decided that a 10 percent, or 20 percent, 30 percent success rate wasn’t okay.”
“Yes, young people need to learn technology, but if you can help them deal with what’s happened to them, then you can help them show up on time, you can make sure they’re ready for work,” Rhoton says. “It’s harder, it’s longer.”
Brandon Rodriguez, a 19-year-old student intern for Hopeworks and lifelong Camden resident, says that when he joined the organization, he was only looking for a gig learning graphic design.
“When you come into Hopeworks, you have this pre-conceived notion that you’re coming here for an internship, or you’re coming here to just talk to someone. You don’t think you’re gonna get as much as you get.” he says. “I’ve only been here for less than a week, about five days now, but the opportunities started flying my way.”
Student-turned-mentor Frankie Matas graduated in 2013. Today he works with incoming Hopeworks students.
“Everybody learns different. If some people need to show them a different way, I help them in that aspect,” he says. “Hopeworks noticed that about me, and that’s what got me to become the first youth trainer. It helped me become a better leader.”
That aspect of youth training and leadership is key, says Rhoton.
“It’d be one thing if someone who looked like me was teaching you how to code, but if it’s someone who, just a few weeks ago, was standing on the corner with you, that’s a powerful message about who can do it, and how you can do it,” says Rhoton.
To that extent, Hopeworks has been successful since Rhoton came on board. The program has seen a 300 percent increase in students going into college and employs nearly 50 students each year after graduation to work within their studios, which take in $600,000 in annual revenue designing websites, among other things. Other participants land part-time and full-time jobs in the tech market, says Rhoton.
“What we wanna do is we wanna make sure we change the equation,” says Rhoton. “So that our young people are not only able to change their lives, but they’re able to change lives in the next generation, as well.
The 2017 AllStars program is produced in partnership with Comcast NBCUniversal and celebrates social entrepreneurs who are powering solutions with innovative technology. Visit NationSwell.com/AllStars from Oct. 2 to Nov. 2 to vote for your favorite AllStar. The winner will receive the AllStar Award, a $10,000 grant to help further his or her work advocating for change.
[button url=”http://nationswell4.wpengine.com/tech-impact-allstars-2017/#vote-now-for-your-favorite-tech-impact-allstar” ]Vote for Dan Now![/button]
The Strange Bedfellows Working to Save the Honeybee, Why Uber Is Getting in the Business of Public Transit and More
A Swarm of Controversy, WIRED
Can environmentalists and Big Agriculture come together to save honeybees? It’s a question Jerry Hayes, a former hive inspector turned Monsanto scientist, asks constantly. As conservationists blame Hayes’s company for colony collapse, he asks humans to learn something from the bees: how to cooperate for the hive’s sake.
Welcome to Uberville, The Verge
An experiment in an Orlando suburb could change the face of public transit. As part of a contract between Altamonte Springs, Fla. and Uber, local government subsidizes intra-city rides with the startup and fronts additional funds when connecting with mass transit. Critics argue that the plan isn’t accessible to low-income and disabled riders, but Altamonte officials say the deal was the only affordable way to connect the suburb’s sprawl.
Chicago Tackles Youth Unemployment As It Wrestles with Its Consequences, Chicago Tribune
Applying for a first job in Chicago can feel “like trying to go across Lake Michigan,” insiders say. Rap sheets or typo-laden résumés can ward off employers, and inaccessible transit through high-crime areas can discourage adolescents — disconnecting 41 percent of the Second City’s 18–24 year olds from work or school. Fortunately, a bevy of groups are helping this vulnerable group land work.
The Legislation That Has the Potential to Reduce Youth Recidivism in California
The California juvenile justice system is caught in a depressing Catch-22.
It’s common knowledge that schools are one of the best ways to keep kids out of trouble. But for the troubled ones that are sent to juvenile hall, they face very difficult odds of reenrolling in class once they’ve served their time. This often means that if these kids aren’t readmitted, they are back on the streets — missing out on an education and possibly turning to a life of crime.
Nationwide, 80 percent of incarcerated juvenile offenders end up behind bars again. For California — the state with the highest rate of incarcerated youth — this has to stop. But now, a new bipartisan-approved bill (currently waiting Gov. Jerry Brown’s signature) could change this troubling statistic, VoiceWaves reports.
AB 2276, authored by Assemblymember Raul Bocanegra, could ensure “that juvenile justice-involved youth have a successful educational transition when they return to their local schools, and creates a process to help promote best practices for this transition.”
MORE: The Radical School Reform That Just Might Work
California’s juvenile court schools have the highest dropout rates in the state. VoiceWaves reporter Michael Lozano explains that “of the roughly 42,000 youth who attend California’s juvenile court schools each year, only 20 percent successfully reenroll within 30 days of their release from the system.”
Why do these kids have so much trouble going back to school?
According to Lozano’s report, when a child is released from the juvenile court system, school records are not immediately transferred from probation officials to the county office of education. This means that schools might force these kids to take redundant classes, or in a much worse case, deny these students from enrolling completely.
What’s troubling is that the majority of the country’s incarcerated youth are locked up for non-violent offenses, such as California high schooler Tanisha Denard, who served time in juvenile hall after racking up repeated truancies because she often couldn’t afford the bus to school, VoiceWaves reports. After being released, school officials did not allow her to reenroll at her former school. Luckily, she found another school to attend — but it wasn’t easy. Denard tells the publication that she only had five days to gather her numerous academic records, find a school that would actually accept her, as well as negotiate with her probation officer for an extension during her search. “A lot of times you get out from juvenile hall, and they look at you like a criminal, [and] they’re not likely to send you to a school where you’re likely to be successful,” she says.
There’s also appears to be a lot of miscommunication between the state’s probation offices and education departments. AB 2276 aims to reform a current law that would require these agencies to work together, expedite a student’s documents, as well as collaborate with local education organizations that help a child successfully reintegrate back into school. The bill would also create a stakeholder group that would study successful reentry programs and report back to the legislature.
ALSO: Foster Kids Need One Thing to Succeed in School. A Former Teacher’s Goal Is to Give It to Every Single One
It’s wrong to deny these kids another chance at an education, especially since most of them just want another shot. As Assemblymember Bocanegra says in his bill, “In 2010, the U.S. Department of Justice found that more than two-thirds of youth in custody have ambitions of higher education.”
It’s currently unknown how much the bill would cost; the creation of the stakeholder group alone would reportedly require $100,000. The Alliance for Boys and Men of Color, who has urged passage of the bill, found that the cost of a year of incarceration for a youth who does not reengage is $180,000. Additionally, the organization says that “youth who do not successfully transition back into school after leaving the juvenile justice system and drop out cost the state $46 billion a year, including $12 billion in crime costs alone.”
For California’s formerly incarcerated youth, this might just be a very small price to pay.
DON’T MISS: How Portland, Ore., Is Translating Student Grit Into Success
In This Tough Chicago Neighborhood, Kids Are Choosing to Box, Not Fight
The Chicago Youth Boxing Club (CYBC) is tucked in a church basement in the Windy City’s Little Village neighborhood, providing one of the area’s few after school activities. Since it was founded in 2006, the gym has become much more than a place for kids to hang out. “It isn’t enough to get kids off the street,” says Ana Patricia Juarez, programming manager for CYBC, “you have to build them into leaders and people who will eventually give back to their communities.” The boxing club now provides counseling, nutritional education, and college readiness programs.
Despite a Major Setback, This Young Woman Continues to Fight for At-Risk Youth
It’s tough running a small business, especially for a 24-year-old.
But one Kansas native refuses to lose when it comes to achieving her dream of running a boxing gym. At only 5-foot, 3-inches, E-Lisa Moreno may be small in stature but she knows how to pack a punch.
Moreno first launched her gym, RNE Boxing, three years ago in the Kansas City suburb of Merriam, Kansas. After realizing her passion for boxing and teaching youth, Moreno convinced her father to help her open shop.
“I love seeing a kid who people saw as ‘bad’ become someone who has accomplished something,” she told the National Journal. More than 10 of RNE Boxing’s members are at-risk youth.
As a teenager, Moreno found her love for sparring while passing time at a gym where her two younger brothers took boxing classes. A coach allowed the 17-year-old to slip on a pair of gloves that would eventually lead to her destiny. After just a few months, Moreno dropped almost 50 pounds, and soon, she began spending more time at the gym while her father assumed the role of her coach, traveling with her to compete throughout Kansas.
Her hard work paid off. Moreno took second place in her weight category at the 2010 National Women’s Golden Gloves tournament in Florida. While attending community college on a scholarship from the Kansas City Golden Gloves, Moreno pursued her professional boxing career and coached children as well.
But it was her belief in a 13-year-old girl that inspired Moreno to open a gym. After coaching the tween to three national championship titles, her student passed away in a traffic accident. Instead of returning to the gym where she trained the girl, Moreno decided it was time to open her own place to coach.
In memoriam of the young girl, Moreno named the gym after her student’s initials, RNE. Business was booming when they first opened. Just six months after RNE Boxing opened its doors, the gym boasted around 500 members.
But within a year, local regulations for a sprinkler in case of a fire led Moreno and her father to downsize. The building owner refused to pay for the upgrade, and the Morenos had no choice.
“The cheapest estimate we got was $20,000,” Moreno said. “So we started looking for another place.”
Now, RNE Boxing is run out of a smaller building that can only hold around 60 people, which led to members abandoning the once spacious gym. But that hasn’t stopped this twenty-something from chasing her dream of working with troubled teens.
Moreno now works a day job as a waitress at a Mexican restaurant while her father has also taken a day job. When she thinks about whether she should have made another career choice, she remembers, “It’s all about the kids,” she said. “It’s always been about them.”
These 3 Urban Farms Provide the Formerly Incarcerated an Opportunity to Grow
You can’t argue with the benefits of urban farming. Not only does it provide fresh, local food, but it also helps to unite a community.
While most of these farms focus exclusively on the sprouting fruits and vegetables, a few are looking to grow better lives for a group that is commonly forgotten: former prisoners and at-risk youths.
With 2.2 million people currently in jail, according to the Sentencing Project, the U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the world. But even after being released, life for many of these individuals doesn’t get much (if any) better. Many employers don’t want to hire ex-convicts, so the former prisoners fall back into their old life, committing crimes and returning to jail — continuing the cycle.
Which is where these urban farms come in. They employ those that are formerly incarcerated and at-risk youth, offering job-training programs and putting these individuals on a path towards higher education and full-time employment.
Here are three standout urban farms (according to Sustainable Cities Collective) working towards this goal.
1. Recovery Park: Detroit, Michigan
Started in 2010, Recovery Park currently has a fully-operational 30-acre farm on land that used to be an empty parking lot. That isn’t all though, as the group is now working to create a three-tiered business model that will produce fresh food for the neighborhood as well as create jobs for those unable to find employment, such as former inmates and addicts. Eventually, the farm plans to have 2,475 acres of land, plus a food processing facility and an indoor aquaponic farm. Over the next 10 years, the goal is to create 18,000 jobs.
2. Seattle Youth Garden Works: Seattle, Washington
On the west coast, you will find the Seattle Youth Garden Works. Since 1995, this group has been providing employment and education for young adults who are either homeless or involved with the juvenile justice system. Positive reinforcement and an education in agriculture, cooking, nutrition, entrepreneurship and resume building are provided to the group of 16-21 year olds.
3. Windy City Harvest Corps: Chicago, Illinois
From 2009-2013, the Windy City Harvest Corps offered 13-week transitional jobs in the urban farming industry to 60-90 recently-released inmates. During that time, the individuals were taught job skills and given the opportunity to better their lives. After completing the program, many went on to work for Windy City Harvest or to other full-time jobs.
However, with the start of 2014, the group has switched their focus to at-risk youths. Through a partnership with the Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice, the group will work to create employment and education opportunities to curb the rate of imprisonment among 17-21 year olds.
To check out a few more promising urban farming programs, click here.
Opportunity can arise from anywhere, and as those that participate in these initiatives are experiencing, it can come in the form of farming. Sometimes a little dirt is all it takes to live a clean life.
MORE: This Inmate Has Become a Diving Expert in Prison. Here’s Why That’s Good for America
Meet a Veteran That Uses a 19th Century Art Form to Capture Today’s Soldiers
What do you know about tintypes? Chances are, probably not much. After all, it’s a photography technique that was popular during the Civil War, involving reactive chemicals, metal plates, and a large-format camera.
Photographer and former gunner on combat search-and-rescue helicopters Ed Drew took artistic inspiration from this old format, setting up photo sessions with his fellow soldiers, which he’d have to abandon whenever he was called out on a mission. Still, he had time to capture plenty of striking and evocative portraits.
“I like tintypes because it’s not just something simple…you have to set it up and you have to be really physical with it, you can’t just click,” he told Scott Shafer of the PBS NewsHour. “You’re basically making a photo on a piece of metal. You’re exposing it, developing it and fixing it all right then and there.”
When Drew learned that he would be deployed to Afghanistan last year, he packed his camera. According to Shafer, Drew’s tintypes were the first to be created in a combat zone since the Civil War, when families typically would use them to capture a final memory of a loved one before he went off to war.
Once Drew left the military, he struggled to find his purpose, eventually deciding to use his photography to show the beauty of people. Now he attends the San Francisco Art Institute and works with The Garden Project in San Bruno, California, with a program for at-risk youth. The Air Force veteran now makes tintypes of young people learning job skills through organic farming.
“I think the imperfections of tintypes is what I really enjoy,” Drew told Shafer, “and I think it’s a great analogy for life, life is not perfect whether they have a little speck on them or a little streak of silver that just kind of went awry, you accept the image just like you accept the person.”
MORE: How One Veteran Discovered the Healing Power of Art and Made it His Mission to Share With Others