GREAT BARRINGTON — The backstory of Great Barrington-based youth development organization Railroad Street Youth Project (RSYP) may be familiar to anyone who’s been paying attention to the South County nonprofit landscape. It was 1999, and 19-year-old Amanda Root, who’d dropped out of Monument Mountain, was dismayed by the disengagement and sense of alienation she was seeing among her friends. She, along with many adults in the community, were especially upset by a spate of youth deaths. Over the course of a few years a dozen young people had succumbed to overdoses, accidents and suicides. Community members of all ages were mobilized to do something.
With the proceeds made by putting on the youth-led show “SubUrbia,” about disaffected young people, Root started a fund at Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation, where Carter White, then BTCF’s Vice President for Administration and Finance, helped her craft a mission statement. Erik Bruun — the only original board member still serving, and now the owner of SoCo Creamery — said of Railroad Street, “At the beginning all we had was $2,500, a mission statement, and a lot of passion to help youth have a voice.”
A building at 70 Railroad Street was established as a drop-in center for youth ages 14–25, and became a base of operations for Railroad Street’s growing set of programs. When Root moved on to higher education after a few years, new leaders emerged, and the organization, against all odds and assumptions, continued to grow. The name “Railroad Street” became so iconic they decided to keep it even after 2008, when they moved into the Schneider Youth building on Bridge Street, adjacent to the skate park and Memorial Field.
What’s the secret sauce? How did an idea matched to a modest fund transform into an essential community institution with a staff of 28 and an annual budget of more than 1 million dollars? At its heart, Railroad Street has stayed loyal to a simple, revolutionary idea. If you want to know what kids want, ask the kids what they want, listen to their answers, and work with great patience and even greater faith to support their goals. [Full disclosure: I worked with RSYP from 2004–2011.]
Back in the early aughts, when Railroad Street mostly served as a place to congregate on sagging, mismatched couches, a key source of tension in downtown Great Barrington was not, as it is now, the paucity of parking spaces or absence of affordable shopping and living options. It was the presence of teenagers.
Current Railroad Street Executive Director Ananda Timpane has been in her current role for 10 years, but she was once one of the young people in question. When she considers what’s changed for the better since then, she points first to how the town used to treat its young people. “We were literally being asked not to be on the sidewalks, not to sit on benches. Benches were removed because teenagers were the ones sitting on them. That was the level of conflict.”
Working through and beyond that conflict was tricky, contentious and slow-going. I served as the organization’s interim director for a brief stretch in 2005, and my first task on day one was to field angry questions from the Chief of Police and Town Manager about what they perceived as the link between our graffiti class and the appearance of illicit graffiti around town.
Few people then would have believed that business owners, police and other town officials might one day sit down with the kids hanging out in the Triplex parking lot to seek common ground, much less serve alongside one another on committees.
Yet today that’s exactly where Railroad Street is, and has been for some time. Cara Becker, assistant to Great Barrington Police Chief Paul Storti, is co-chair of Railroad Street’s Community Health Coalition, and sits on the coalition’s parent education subcommittee. Becker, along with Railroad Street, Fairview Hospital and Great Barrington Selectboard Chairman Steve Bannon, were the co-creators of the South County Opioid Working Group. Railroad Street receives grants through the town’s Cannabis Mitigation funds and contracts each summer with the Department of Public Works to oversee the Skate Park. Monument Mountain High School now has a health and wellness curriculum for all 9th and 10th grade students partly thanks to the efforts of Sara Rawson, a former Railroad Street constituent who worked on the initiative with, among other people, longtime Railroad Street supporter and former board member Sean Flynn.
“The fact of Railroad Street changes our community,” said Timpane, “In the beginning, Railroad Street was the only one being like, ‘We can empower you. Youth can lead.’ And now it’s all around us.”
Deputy Director Sabrina Allard agrees, and sees a more personal shift, too, especially in the dynamics in downtown GB. “I think the intentional work from business owners like Erik Bruun understanding what youth empowerment looks like has had an effect on other businesses. I hear it from my own child, who’s in 9th grade, who goes to town every other weekend with a group of friends. They are welcomed in almost any eatery that they go to. I don’t think that was really happening 20 years ago.”
Railroad Street’s initial purview, apart from providing a safe and welcoming space for youth to gather, was to support youth-created projects, and that work lives on in the Youth Operational Board. Youth interns still take the lead in weekly meetings to discuss and approve funding or other support for youth-led or youth-focused projects. Every other week adults are welcome to join, and so on a recent Tuesday afternoon, I contributed suggestions to proposals put forth for a summer skateboard-making class, a Memorial Day weekend concert put on by a band from Simon’s Rock, and a block party on June 10. (Among the questions asked were about a waiver for the class, extension cords for the concert, and a food truck for the party.)
For many years, Railroad Street has also been the sexual health education provider for South County schools, and the organizer of a yearly youth conference. Constituents undertook the W.E.B. Du Bois mural that graces the wall of the alleyway connecting Railroad Street with the Triplex lot. The organization’s Railroad Street Youth Student Empowerment (RYSE) program leads high school juniors and seniors through a one-week, stipended summer bootcamp in skill and confidence-building, and through it, participants can apply for up to $20,000 in scholarship funds to use toward higher education. Its ongoing programs include mentoring and apprenticeship programs, a Q club for LGBTQIA+ youth, and, as ever, advocacy and support as needed.
Since 2006, the signature apprenticeship has been in the culinary arts, a program that has been led through the years by chefs from many local restaurants, including John Andrews, the Red Lion Inn, the former Pearls, and Prairie Whale, and has given hundreds of local teens a taste of life in a professional kitchen.
With all these projects, said Timpane, “Nine times out of ten, we are really taking that idea of a young person or a group of young people and linking them with resources in the community to get it done.”
Another important role Railroad Street has taken on through its Community Health Coalition is as the vehicle through which South County gleans critical data on risk and protective factors impacting area youth. The biennial Prevention Needs Assessment Survey is given to 8th, 10th and 12th graders in the two school districts, and the good news there is that students over the past 20 years have reported less and less heroin use over time. In fact, on the three most recent surveys, not a single one reported use. But while that problem seems to have eased up, at least among minors, others have shifted to the forefront. Alcohol rates, for example, have gone way up in the past few years among kids on the younger end of the age spectrum.
Most alarming is the depression and anxiety levels students are reporting. Just before the pandemic, Railroad Street raised the red flag on the issue, as nearly half of all students counted themselves in this number. “Students we were working with [said], ‘This is a really big deal. We need to pay attention to this,” said Timpane. Then the pandemic struck, and the depression and anxiety rate went up 10 points, to 60 percent.
Railroad Street now employs a Director of Recovery and Support and Parent Support Coordinator, and its staff can lean on a wide network of well-established relationships with school, medical and other human service staff in the region to connect the most vulnerable young people and their families with the help they need.
There are no easy answers or fixes to these and other problems. As Railroad Street learned right from the start, and as evidenced by the mark they continue to make on our world, the real secret sauce is relationships.
Two former constituents have now come full circle with Railroad Street. Luiza Trabka is the organization’s youngest and newest board member. After years living away, she’s working now as a full-time baker at Berkshire Mountain Bakery in Housatonic, and serving on the decorating committee for the upcoming Culinary Arts Dinner. Back in 2011, she was Timpane’s informal mentee, and both an employee and constituent of Railroad Street, organizing a conference and applying with a friend for funding for an international “woofing” trip abroad to Spain and Greece. “When we came back, in return [for our grant] we hosted a dinner party with Greek souvlaki, with a slide show. It was a great way to share our trip.”
I first met Eric Brenner when he was 14, a freshman at Monument, and newly arrived in the area from Westchester County. He made his way to Railroad Street because that’s where his new friends were hanging out. He continued to mostly hang out until the creation of the Youth Operational Board (YOB).
“I started going to the YOB meetings, and that just spring boarded into all kinds of things.” He helped fundraise for a trip to Peru, and plan for paintball outings and trips to New York City. He’s been a beneficiary of and a spokesperson for Railroad Street’s guiding ethos: if you believe in young people’s ability to handle things, they’ll handle them.
“When you talk about budgeting, and giving these kids free rein with money,” said Brenner, “adults immediately go, ‘That’s a bad idea.’ I had to remind them to ask a simple question, like, ‘Okay, how much of their budget did they spend last year?’ It was $6,000 out of a possible $10,000, so they conserved $4,000. They’re not incapable of managing money. They may make mistakes, and that’s okay. That’s part of the reason why we’re doing this. They will learn.”
Brenner is now in his early thirties, owns a web design business, and has been hopping around Mexico and Europe in recent years, working remotely, landing back in Great Barrington periodically to visit family and friends. How did his time as a constituent impact what’s come since? “In a typical education, you’re given few options for a class project with a certain set of criteria in order to get a very specific grade. It’s not really how the world works. I think I got a much more real-life experience from the Youth Project.”
This weekend, on Saturday, May 21 at 5:30 p.m., on Memorial Field in Great Barrington (adjacent to the Drop-In Center), Railroad Street will be holding its first in-person Culinary Arts Dinner since 2019. This semester, 12 young chefs will prepare a five-course meal, under the guidance of chef mentors Zee Vassos of No.10 on Castle Street in Great Barrington, Jesse Holmes of The Stagecoach Tavern in Sheffield, Daire Rooney and Jim Corcoran of Marjoram & Roux, and Dan Smith of John Andrews.After the meal, RYSE Scholarships will be awarded to local students Stephanie Celis and Julian Escobar.
Tickets to the May 21 dinner are almost sold out; please call 413-528-2475 to purchase them. If you are interested in getting involved with the work of Railroad Street Youth Project as a mentor, you can reach out to russell@rsyp.org, and for questions about intergenerational YOB meetings, contact gabby@rsyp.org.
