Great Barrington — This Monday, December 5th, fourteen teen chefs-in-training with five professional local mentor chefs will prepare a five-course meal at Crissey Farm in Great Barrington, as the culmination of Railroad Street Youth Project’s Fall, 2016, Culinary Arts program. (Tickets for this event are still available, and can be purchased online at rsyp.org.) Participating students come from throughout South County, recruited through the town of Lee’s College Internship Program, high schools, and the community. Participating chefs include the Red Lion Inn’s Brian Alberg, Firefly’s Zee Vassos, and Dan Smith of John Andrews, with help on Monday night from Daire Rooney of Mezze Catering.
For nearly ten years now, Railroad Street’s Apprenticeship program (RAP) has aimed to meet the real world training needs of students and young adults, and Culinary Arts has been the cornerstone. Many alumni have used RAP as a professional steppingstone. Nick Heller, a member of the very first group, has been working in kitchens ever since, and is now at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles. He will be moving back to the area soon. An older graduate, Kristin, now works in restaurant management in a hotel in Washington, D.C., and another recent alumna has found her niche locally in management at John Andrews.
Railroad Street Youth Project, says founding and current, board member Erik Bruun, “has always been an evolving organization, responsive to the changing needs of young people. It came out of a need that was highlighted by what was going on at the time [late 1990’s], with all these deaths of young people from suicide, alcohol-related car accidents and drug overdoses.”
The young founders (19-year-old Amanda Root was the first director) recognized that these deaths were symptoms of a larger phenomenon. Young people were feeling overlooked or disparaged, and not listened to. The organization has been headquartered on Bridge Street for many years now, but retains Railroad Street in its name because at the time of the organization’s creation, that area was ground zero for tensions between the youth population and local business owners and patrons. There was an unmet need, on the youth side, for a place to congregate, and on the adult side, too many loud, loitering youths crowding the sidewalks.
RSYP solved that particular problem long ago, and its comfortable drop-in center is still the place on any given afternoon for dozens of kids and young adults ages 14-25 to congregate informally or meet on joint projects. South County’s youth population still has a range of unmet needs. As Executive Director Ananda Timpane says of today’s climate for those coming of age in South Berkshire County, “We are at a really important point, where we see what happens when people feel like they don’t have a future in their own communities. We are losing population. At RSYP, we’ve always been about the needs of individuals, whether they want college or not. We ask what they need to thrive and see their future, not as something abstract, but concrete, now, here.”
The other apprenticeship components change from year to year, according to evolving needs and interests and resources. For the 2016 – 2017 school year, in addition to Culinary Arts, RSYP will offer Cosmetology in the spring, and will be also adding two new fields; computer coding, with Asa Hardcastle, and social justice theater, for young women with Emma Dweck from Kickstarter Ensemble. (Enrollment is now open for those two.)
Another component of RSYP’s activities is its mentoring program, just going into its 12th year. (Full disclosure: I started the mentoring program, and handed it off to RSYP.) Sabrina, the current mentoring coordinator, is focusing on interest-based matches, and is now recruiting artists, welders, and others who represent a range of career paths and skills and passions.
She’s looking to make mentoring matches around these paths, so that, for instance, a high school student with a passion for visual art would be matched with a working mentor and gets to see firsthand what goes on in a studio. A would-be mechanic would spend time in a working garage. In this way, the organization can be responsive to individual needs. (The Edge recently interviewed local musical artist Jackson Whalan, who cited his RSYP-created mentoring match with Soultube Music’s Robby Baier as a turning point in his life.)
RSYP also provides Sexual Health Education to students at Simon’s Rock and in both local school districts in grades 7 through 9, in certain cases with classroom teachers teaching the RSYP-provided curriculum. Surveys have found that kids who learn through this curriculum are more likely to use condoms and to delay sexual activity, with an even greater positive difference among boys.
Some of RSYP’s current Youth Operational Board (YOB) members were not yet born when YOB began holding its 4 p.m., Tuesday afternoon meetings. This is the core of the organization, where youth take the lead, discuss concerns, review applications from community members for youth-inspired activities, and find their voice. This year YOB has two paid interns, high school students, one from each district. The most recently youth-inspired event was the reinstatement of a monthly open mike. Thirty people turned out for its first poetry night.
YOB is fielding bigger ideas these days, around the issues young people are passionate about, like fighting racism, and they’ve taken on the role of providing a space for difficult conversations. Adults who have an idea for a youth-focused activity should apply in conjunction with a young person.
RSYP is also the lead agency on the new iteration of what was the South Berkshire Community Coalition, now called the South Berkshire Community Health Coalition. The members of this group represent a range of community sectors; the coalition is in the first year of a state grant the goal of which is to confront substance abuse among youth.
Timpane pointed out that when it comes to drugs and alcohol use, we’ve tended to get hung up on statistics and trends. This area has traditionally, and continues to have, significantly higher rates of drug and alcohol use among youth than our counterparts in the rest of the state and country. But, she adds, “It doesn’t matter how you feel about alcohol and pot. There’s simply something not working for young people in this picture. The survey is a report card on the community, and through it, we know that kids do not get a clear message that we value them. This is about health, not about right and wrong. The numbers I’m interested in are those that reflect whether or not kids feel valued at the community level, and those numbers are low and dropping. [Students report that their schools do a good job of recognizing them.] Saying hello on the street, looking one another in eye, we can all do that. The big stuff is how do kids get a message that they are valued. That is tricky, since our local school budget is driven by the state budget, and every year there’s a debate about what can or cannot be funded. Kids’ takeaway message from the failure to fund the high school renovation, especially, was clear: ‘They don’t care about us.’ ”
This is why, says Timpane, events like this Monday’s culinary celebration are so important, as an opportunity for the adult community to celebrate young people’s accomplishments loudly and visibly.
Last year, the dinner was at full capacity, with 140 guests, and it’s become a significant fundraiser. The first dinner was hosted by Steve Picheny’s Pearls Restaurant, then at the top of Railroad Street, and he is still involved in the program. That night, says Bruun, “We couldn’t give the tickets away.” They’ve come a long way since then, with still, as always, a long way to go.
