Lighthouse Youth Development Center

John Duchak, Summer 2016

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 past summer I spent 8 weeks helping out at Lighthouse Youth Development Center. Lighthouse YDC is a residential treatment center for teenage boys that have behavioral, emotional, and mental health problems. These boys have all experienced a great deal of trauma in their early lives. Traditional foster care has not worked out for them, so Jobs and Family Services (JFS) has placed them at YDC. In the mornings at YDC I helped serve the boys breakfast before we went to the Lighthouse charter school where some of the boys worked in the summer work program. The summer work program involved the boys taking care of an urban garden in Madisonville where they grow a great deal of produce and cared for chickens. The work program focused on teaching the boys how to keep a job. They fostered teamwork skills and learned about food and where it comes from. My role at the summer work program was to help oversee how the boys were doing and to set a good example of what it takes to be a hard worker. In the afternoon a staff member at YDC would come pick us up and we would head back to the house where I would help serve the boys lunch. My afternoons at YDC varied from day to day. Most days I would hang out with the boys and play basketball or just talk with them. Some days I would go on walks with the boys to the local park. About three afternoons a week I usually sat in their group therapy sessions that were held on site by one of the social workers. Occasionally, we would go on excursions in the afternoon to the pool, Kings Island, and bowling. I also was able to attend a few of the boys’ appointments with their psychiatrists. Working at YDC is an opportunity to get to know the daily struggles that boys with mental health problems face on an everyday basis. It is a really neat opportunity to see what mental health problems are like outside of the clinic. Working at YDC requires a great deal of patience and the ability to step back and not take things personally. It is a challenging place to work day in and day out, but it was a worthwhile way to spend my summer better understanding how behavior is influenced by previous traumatic experience and what that might mean for my future patients.