TEEN EMPOWERMENT HISTORY
The Teen Empowerment Model is the product of decades of thoughtful experience in changing the values, beliefs, and behaviors of youth and adults, making institutions more effective, and developing mechanisms for people of all ages to work productively together toward achieving important goals. The model's developer, Stanley Pollack, began his career in 1973 as a street outreach worker for the city of Somerville, Massachusetts, and the basic components of the model were created over the next eight years in Somerville. From 1982 to 1992, Stanley built a successful consulting practice, implementing the model in communities throughout Massachusetts. In July 1992, with the support of the Boston Foundation and the Hayden and Riley Foundations, he founded The Center for Teen Empowerment, Inc. in order to demonstrate both the power of the TE Model to generate solutions to difficult problems that confront urban communities and the model's potential applications in a wide range of social service and educational settings.
The Center began work in Boston's South End/Lower Roxbury community by hiring a group of 14 teens as youth organizers. Through the TE training process, these youth identified their initial goal of finding solutions to the epidemic of gang violence that had taken the lives of several of their friends and was filling their neighborhoods with hatred and fear. The strategy they developed included organizing a series of community meetings for youth, police, and adults. This process culminated in the first Youth Peace Conference in May 1993, which brought together five rival gangs to create a peace treaty.
As an integral part of these community change initiatives, the young people emphasized the connection between gang violence and the lack of jobs and educational opportunities available to urban youth. In addition, they highlighted the pervasive racial and class biases that were helping fuel the rage that many urban youth were expressing through gang-related and other destructive and self-destructive activities. They successfully focused their organizing efforts to push the city, local businesses, and media outlets to expand youth employment programs. Over the next several years, Teen Empowerment youth organizers implemented strategies that encouraged the Boston Police Department to increase community policing programs and decrease the practice of negatively profiling neighborhood youth.
In the spring of 1994, Teen Empowerment received funding from the Riley Foundation to bring the TE Model into the context of a Boston public high school, thus beginning a 13-year presence in the schools. TE's first school-based site opened at Madison Park Technical Vocational High School in September. In 1996 and 1997, TE opened sites at two district high schools, first at the English High School, then at Dorchester High (now the Dorchester Education Complex). Schools sites used the TE Model to systematically involve young people in analyzing their school community, determining the priority issues that needed to be addressed, and then developing and carrying out strategies to address the identified issues.
TE's community-based work began expanding in 2003 with a site in Rochester, NY. In 2004, TE opened a site in Somerville, MA. In 2006 and 2007, TE opened sites in two neighborhoods of Boston: first in the Bowdoin/Geneva area of Dorchester, then in Egleston Square, Roxbury.
All sites use the TE Model to systematically involve young people in analyzing their school community, determining the priority issues that need to be addressed, and then developing and carrying out strategies to address the identified issues.
Teen Empowerment has organized hundreds of school and community reform initiatives since 1992, and our focus continues to be on youth organizing--developing effective strategies that involve youth in creating positive social and institutional change in their communities and schools. In recent years TE has also expanded its work to include adapting the model's component parts as tools to increase productivity in adult work settings and to enhance the effectiveness of other youth and educational service providers. This work includes designing and facilitating training sessions for teachers, police, and human service and youth service providers; developing curricula for schools, residential treatment facilities, and vocational training programs; and developing materials that make Teen Empowerment methods available to all.