Chicago Youth Centers holds racial healing workshops and Teen Council camp with Healing Illinois funds

Chicago Youth Centers, a nonprofit serving youth in 20 under-resourced locations across Chicago, used their Healing Illinois grant to enhance their teen programming. Six Teen Council members attended racial healing workshops, where they discussed topics like adultism, the school-to-prison pipeline, and segregation, with the intention of bringing what they learned back to the other teens and preteens. Healing Illinois also helped fund a camp for all Teen Council members. CYC hopes to bring back these programs in 2025.

For Part 1 of Chicago Youth Centers’ story, focused on the out-of-school time enrichment programs and annual sneaker ball, click here.

CYC TEEN COUNCILS: A LEADERSHIP OPPORTUNITY FOR TEENS

Chicago Youth Centers specialize in early education, out-of-school time programs, and family engagement, and many of their locations have a teen program, which provides leadership opportunities and extracurriculars that are more engaging for older kids. (See the different types of CYC locations and their programs here.)

Enrollment numbers in the teen program varies from location to location. At the South Shore location, there are 25 teens in the broader program, and two teen leaders who serve on the Teen Council. Across all of Chicago, there are about 20 Teen Council leaders total.

CYC staff have noticed significant personal and social-emotional growth in young leaders who participate in Teen Council. We had a chance to speak with the current Teen Council President, who plans to attend college and become a lawyer.

Roberta Douglas, Center Director at CYC-Rebecca K. Crown Youth Center, says she has seen his aspirations and skills grow the more time he has spent with CYC. “He's one of my favorite kids, and he's made a 360° turn,” she shares. “And he's a very good kid and got a good future in front of him because of the possibilities we put in front of him, CYC has put in front of him."

A TWO-PART OPPORTUNITY FOR TEEN LEADERS: RACIAL HEALING WORKSHOPS AND CAMP

CYC's 2024 Healing Illinois grant helped fund two teen programs.

The first was a series of six racial healing workshops for a small group of six Teen Council leaders, plus the staff from their respective locations. Each seminar lasted three to four hours so teens had the opportunity to dive into racial healing topics and practice mock scenarios.

Funds also went to a one-day camp for all Teen Council members to bond and share experiences from their respective neighborhoods.

Group opportunities for the Teen Council leaders, especially those that allow them to travel outside their home neighborhood, are crucial for their personal development.

“It's really important for those centers to all connect because very rarely are programs able to come together and actually get to know each other and get to know more about each other's communities,” says Elisa Shaw, Development Coordinator at Chicago Youth Centers. “And very rarely is it possible for them to really see other areas and go and experience different things,”

TOPICS COVERED IN THE TEEN RACIAL HEALING WORKSHOPS

Chicago Youth Centers discussion among teen students

The six racial healing workshops covered a variety of difficult topics, including adultism, trauma-informed care, healing justice, unpacking systemic racism, circle keeping, cycles of oppression, and the school-to-prison pipeline. Attendees got the chance to practice conversations around race that might not go as expected, to better prepare for real-life situations.

The Teen Council President mentions that he got a chance to learn about historical topics that continue to have ripple effects for Black teens today: “We talked about how they implemented the Jim Crow laws as a way after to continue to keep Black people down because after slavery, they wanted to find a legal way to do it because they couldn't be straightforward. So they used Jim Crow laws to continuously keep Black people down and oppress them, and they also used segregation laws.”

As for the most impactful topic, he shares, “Adultism. I didn't really realize until I went to a workshop about how much I experienced adultism on a daily basis.”

Adultism is the bias that adults have against children and teens and can occur in complex social situations, such as at school, at a job, out in public, or in their own homes.

The workshop provided suggestions for how teens could engage in conversations about adultism, or at least recognize it and name it while it was happening. Anjel Williams, Program Manager at CYC-Rebecca K. Crown Youth Center, shares her thoughts on how teens can handle adultism in their lives using the tools they learned in the workshop.

“…After the adultism training, I had a really intense conversation with [the Teen Council President] about adultism, and does he see adultism on the everyday spectrum. And he was able to pinpoint out, ‘Yes, I have teachers who I see who do this to us all of the time.’

“And my conversation was, I don't want you to go back and point out, ‘Hey! That's adultism!’ But I want you to be able to have a conversation with your teachers. Like, ‘This is what I learned, and this is what I see,’ in a very respectful way so that they can understand exactly where you're coming from and what you're saying.”

BRINGING THE WORKSHOP TOOLS BACK TO OTHER TEENS AND PARENTS

Students listening in a discussion led by Chicago Youth Centers

There was also a leadership aspect to the racial healing workshops: Allowing teens to train their peers on the knowledge they learned and prepping them for those conversations.

The six Teen Council members who attended the workshops brought what they learned to all the Teen Council members across Chicago. That larger group of Teen Council members will then in turn, share that information with everyone in the broader teen program.

This type of knowledge sharing is something the Teen Council President wishes he had access to as a preteen. “When I was a kid, there wasn't, like, a Teen Council of older kids who were able to teach me the things that they knew so I could be able to learn more,” he shares.

He also wants to help train the next generation of youth leaders. He hopes the younger kids “will be able to take away the leadership skills that I have and ... when they grow older like me, they will be able to teach the other teens like how I was able to teach them.”

Anjel mentions that Teen Council members can also use their new leadership skills to teach their parents what they learned in the workshops and invite them into the racial healing conversation.

INTER-NEIGHBORHOOD BONDING AT TEEN COUNCIL CAMP

While the racial healing workshops were only available to the smaller group of six teenagers, all Teen Council members were invited to participate in the camp, which was held at YMCA Camp Duncan in Ingleside, Illinois.

This was many of the teens’ first chance to attend a camp like this. They got to enjoy a range of outdoor activities, like rock climbing and archery.

The camp was a huge hit, so much so that Anjel would like to open up the invite in 2025, preferably in the summer so the teens can participate in more of the warm-weather activities, like canoeing.

“We want to build it into teen programming every year,” she says. “We would like to advance and take more teens, and not just the Councils, but the entire teen groups there. And we would love to expand it to at least an overnight. Because a lot of our kids don't get the opportunity of going to camp, when they went, they really enjoyed it.”

For her, this isn’t just a camp day, but also an opportunity for teen leaders to collaborate and generate ideas to bring back home to their individual neighborhoods.

“We all come from different communities and different places,” she says. “But together they were able to learn, ‘What are the similarities within our communities, and what are the differences? And how can we improve our communities? What can we add? What value can we add to our community?’”

FUTURE TEEN PROGRAMMING AT CHICAGO YOUTH CENTERS

This year’s Teen Council programs have been a huge success, and CYC staff hope to continue offering them in the future.

“One thing that we always are striving for is how to sustain the programs that go really well, and this has been one that has gone really well,” says Maggie Shiflett, CYC’s Director of Corporate and Foundation Partnerships.

Anjel agrees and hopes to expand the racial healing workshop opportunity even further to members of other Teen Councils, and perhaps even to teens and preteens.

“...I think that this is something that should be embedded in our teen program. Because we have our 6th and 7th graders who are moving into the teen spectrum who didn't get this opportunity. And so, I would love to see this particular curriculum or workshops be embedded into what we do yearly, and it should be like a rite of passage.”

LEARN MORE ABOUT CHICAGO YOUTH CENTERS, TEEN COUNCIL, AND HEALING ILLINOIS 

Those interested in learning more about Chicago Youth Centers and the Teen Councils can visit: 

Chicago Youth Centers is one of 184 grantees who received Healing Illinois funds for 2023-2024. You can view more sub-grantee stories on the Healing Illinois website and Healing Illinois Instagram page, as well as view past and upcoming Healing Illinois events.  