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| Left to right: David Storch, Director David Lescht, Bonnie Raitt, Guitar Instructor Chris Abeyta, Board Member Michael Dellheim, Kevin Williams, Joseph Sanchez. |
Click here to watch a video about the Youth With Promise program (RealPlayer 9).
IT IS WELL documented that many of our young people in New Mexico are at high risk. There are a large number of young offenders who are caught in a revolving door of probation violations and detention. As repeat offenders, they are unable to break out of their negative and self-destructive cycles and patterns of behavior that keep them on the treadmill of the juvenile justice system and lead to their subsequent graduation into adult correctional facilities. The vast majority of these juvenile offenders are of Hispanic and Native American descent and come from economically disadvantaged circumstances. Local juvenile justice authorities are becoming increasingly aware of studies that conclude that music and the other arts can have profound and sometimes transformational impacts on the physical, mental, and emotional health of people in these settings.
The Youth with Promise program has been providing guitar, dance, and visual arts workshops to juvenile offenders in detention and on probation, to at-risk youth in shelters and residential treatment programs and to other underserved youth in the community. We have been empowering incarcerated youth by enabling them to discover their own creative potential through an immersion into the arts. Then, upon release from detention, they can continue these same workshops during the critical period when they are most at risk of becoming repeat offenders and vulnerable to drifting back into a negative lifestyle.
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The program is designed to capture the artistic creativity of these troubled youngsters while they are incarcerated and then upon their release from detention to provide a continuation of the very same workshops. We are also impacting those enrolled in youth serving agencies and already on probation and other underserved youth who are not necessarily in trouble. The Youth With Promise program continues to grow and evolve as a unique collaboration between our organization and the key players within the juvenile justice system which facilitates the means to track, evaluate and provide incentives to insure steady attendance and maximize class size. We also endeavor to increase our communication with the families of these troubled youth and encourage them to help insure their steady attendance. There are family members who are very supportive of the program and are assisting with transportation.
The continuity and stability of our Youth With Promise program is the key to its success. These young people depend on these ongoing workshops and expect us to be there for them every week. The current schedule of workshops includes five weekly art classes at the Santa Fe County Detention Center (males and females ages 12-18) and three weekly workshops for youth in our outside detention program.
Every Saturday in Santa Fe at the El Museo Cultural Center from 11am to 1 pm, the Youth With Promise program offers Chris Abeyta’s guitar workshop, a visual arts workshops led by Fine Arts for Children & Teens (FACT), and a hip-hop dance class with Karen Price, for its formerly incarcerated juvenile offender participants, for Native American residents of the Intermountain Youth Centers, for young people from the Youth Shelter and Family Services emergency shelter, for residents of the Casa de Su Vida treatment center and for participants from Juvenile Community Corrections. This program is also freely available for any young person in the community whether or not they are at-risk.
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