The initial goal behind the creation of the City of Burlington’s Youth Solutions in October 2019 was to reduce crime among the youth of Burlington, but its vision soon expanded.
Vanessa Diggs, Youth Solutions Coordinator for the City of Burlington, held forums to discover what youth in three specific communities—Beaumont, Housing Authority and Tucker—needed to provide balance in their lives.
“These kids are already living in fragile communities,” Diggs said. “These are marginalized communities, ones that have limited resources.”
Diggs talked to kids in each community and came away impressed by the things they wanted to do. “We asked if they were interested in a youth group to meet once a week just to talk about things they would like to do and that evolved into youth leadership groups in each of the three communities,” she shared. Within those groups, Diggs said the kids initially talked about how they didn’t feel safe. She wanted to find ways to empower them by helping them determine what they could control in their communities.
While a majority of youth, even in marginalized neighborhoods are able to make it, the goal of Diggs’ work was to understand what was preventing all the youth from succeeding.
She looked at the communities through the lens of the theory of resiliency, or how different youth handle adversity, by rating the positive and negative assets in a young person’s life that help to balance them. Diggs determined that the positive things Burlington youth needed in these three communities were a program they felt that they were leading and the opportunity to work and be successful in school.
With the help of Impact Alamance, Youth Solutions wrote a grant proposal for funding to help advance the different projects the three communities wanted to pursue. Meanwhile, Alamance Achieves partnered with Youth Solutions to address the needs of the younger kids in the three communities by bringing parents an early childhood reading program. When COVID-19 affected the incomes and food stability of many in the communities, Alamance Achieves also helped Youth Solutions by delivering boxes of food the United Way had collected.
While the pandemic has altered much of Youth Solutions outreach efforts, the need remains. “We know where the marginalized communities are,” Diggs explained. “School data directs us — if someone is doing poorly in school, we need to find out how we can assist, what can we balance. We can’t change where a child lives, but we can look at that child and bring balance.”
