Lighthouse Youth Development Center

Jacob Waldruff, Summer 2020

The summer work program was the highlight of my time with YDC. Its purpose is to teach the boys—and girls from Lighthouse New Beginnings—the skills they will need for jobs after their time at Lighthouse comes to an end. The boys did things like working community vegetable gardens, building trails through wooded areas, and maintaining local parks in partnership with an organization called Groundwork. Working outside along with the boys was an incredible retreat from the stay-at-home orders of the COVID-19 era, and I could tell that many of them also enjoyed getting out of YDC for a few hours each day.

By the end of the summer, I found myself genuinely impressed with the growth I'd seen in several of the YDC residents over the course of my 8 weeks there. A lot of that growth manifested as improvement at the summer work program—they had more work ethic, better interpersonal skills, and had developed legitimate interests in some of the work they did. Some of the boys also showed growth at home—arguing with their peers less, reflecting on their values, and even taking an interest in yoga as a group therapy exercise.

As UHP interns, we are asked to complete a project that will leave something meaningful for our site after our internship ends. I tried to leave a mark on the residents and leave YDC physically changed by having several of the boys help me start a vegetable garden behind their building. My hope was that they would see that they could apply the skills they gained in one area of their life (work) to another area (home), and that they would be proud to eat whatever they could grow.