Lighthouse Youth Development Center

Brian Lewis, Summer 2015

The community garden at Lighthouse Youth Services that our interns helped with — Our interns at two Lighthouse Youth Services sites worked with adolescents who had faced extraordinarily difficult life circumstances. A major summer project involved collaborative work between these sites on a community garden where the youth were able to cultivate a variety of plants and sell some of the resulting produce to support further work on the garden.

This summer I had the privilege to work at the Lighthouse Youth Development Center (YDC), a foster home for teenage boys. Throughout the summer, I had many roles: mentor, friend, authority figure, and student. Each morning, I worked with the boys at their summer job in an urban garden, supervising them as they planted and harvested crops, weeded, tended chickens, and built things for the garden. At noon, I prepared lunch at the YDC and invited one or two boys to help me each day. In the afternoons, I went on outings with the boys to the park or arcade, played basketball, or played video games with the boys. My project during the summer was to strengthen the boys' abilities to grocery shop and cook for themselves, a skill many of them will need when they go to independent living and in adulthood. Each Friday, two boys and I would plan a full meal for the house and staff, shop at Kroger for our raw ingredients, and then prepare the meal from scratch. The project was very successful in that it taught the boys cooking skills they may not have had and about how to shop. It was exciting for the boys to get in the kitchen and cook. Throughout the project, I had more than half of the boys come to me and ask to cook again, which is why I began letting one boy at a time help with all other meals during the week. Near the end of my project, I began incorporating other YDC staff so they could continue building up the boys' culinary skills. Beyond the garden and my project, I built up good relationships with all of the boys at YDC, which allowed me to learn more about the situations that led them to a foster home and about some of their mental illnesses and behavioral disorders. I truly enjoyed my time working with the boys of YDC this summer and encourage any and all future UHP interns to consider working at this organization.