From Parkland to Oakland

Posted: August 28, 2018

Our Annual Report 2017-2018

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The report we release today, Listening to Our Youth: From Parkland to Oakland, lists results from all of our programs. It includes two very frank and very honest stories from two of the young people we work with, stories that perfectly express the resilience and hope that sustain them against the terrible barriers of violence and inequality they face every day.

Youth ALIVE! was founded on the belief that young people affected by violence have much to contribute in our quest for a safer, more peaceful Oakland. The bloody repetition of school and other mass shootings in our country has rightly brought the effects of violence on our children into the national conversation – a conversation that now stretches from Parkland to Oakland. And no one is more prepared to contribute to that conversation than our youth leaders. Along with regular teenage concerns about what to wear, what tests are coming up, where to meet your friends after school, for our youth, for the young people in our programs, the threat of violence is an everyday concern.

Our job at Youth ALIVE! is to make sure they have a voice in this ongoing discussion; we can all benefit from their ideas and their important stories. Our job is to help youth affected by violence heal from the trauma violence leaves in its wake, so that they might be free, or freer, to realize their hopes, to thrive like any other teen. It’s work we embrace because of the great young people in our community and in this report.