Y.A.L.L. Project
Youth Academy for Latinx Leaders
Javier Ricon
University of Vermont Larner College of Medicine, Class of 2025
Since 2023, I have been coordinating and teaching a summer academy called the Youth Academy for Latino Leaders (YALL) for Latino high school students from low-resource households. The project was to be created and carried out by the Dominican Community Center with support from the Nuvance Global Health Academy.
The YALL program started with six students who had just finished middle school to move on to high school with the goal of introducing them to life skills such as financial literacy, leadership skills, and basic health knowledge that many of their peers have the opportunity to learn but they are often deprived of attaining. Four weeks of engagement with students, facilitators, and other members made it hard to say goodbye at the end of the program.
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Shaila Rodriguez, a current student, noted “What fascinated me the most about the program was the power to develop new skills or knowledge. If it hadn’t been for this program, I probably would have stayed home bored.” Sadly, the lack of these skills can have a rippling effect through generations. If we don’t have the opportunity to learn these skills, we can’t pass them onto the ones that come after us. Thus a cycle of inequality is created and perpetuated. We aimed to break that cycle.
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I knew the task would be challenging, and in the end, it exceeded all my expectations not only in difficulty but also in the sense of accomplishment and the number of surprises. Surprise from the insight many of the young students brought to the group. I can easily recall how difficult it was to be their age, and the trauma of the transition from middle school to high school as a minority first-generation student. If your parents haven’t had the opportunity to have that experience, it’s unlikely that they can help you navigate its complexities. It was difficult to be a teenager 20 years ago. It is only fair to say that it is many orders of magnitude more complex and difficult today. The pressure teenagers must deal with from their peers, social media culture insisting that their lives be perpetually recorded and broadcasted, and expectations from their parents can amount to a Sisyphean task. And yet, students continue to surprise me with how bravely they continue walking through that minefield.
When designing the curriculum for the summer academy, all members of the Dominican Community Center agreed that this barrier could easily be broken by providing even just one example of someone who was able to achieve something that as young students, we couldn’t have dreamt of. In the end, we didn’t find just one lecturer who was of a minority background. All the lecturers were minority community leaders and business owners who volunteered their time because they believed in our mission.
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We hope to continue to welcome these students back during the entirety of their high school careers, and ideally accept a new class of high school freshman next year. Given what we were able to achieve in twenty-four hours of instruction, in four days spread out over four weeks in the summer, I’m excited to see what these students can accomplish over the next four years. We will continue to strive to create a class of community leaders that will better represent the Danbury community, and thus be able to identify and find solutions for issues within the community. I wholeheartedly believe that the Youth Academy for Latino Leaders can achieve this goal.