My Youth Work Journey

*insert an image of my work-in-progress journey map drawing here!*

There are six key points in my journey as a youth worker that I think of

The first thing that starts my now 13-year career in youth work, is the Little Compton After School Club at the Community Center. I was 14 and did I need a job between the band, swim practices, and school work? Probably not but here we are. It was your average after-school club program in a small town. We would meet the students at the school and spend time at the playground, then walk up to the community center (like I said small town everything's close), have a snack, do some homework than do some crafts/activities. 

At my high school, you have to do some kind of senior project, the parameters were pretty vague, so I worked with my middle school band teacher to teach a small group of elementary school students to play the trumpet. It happened after school so while it was more of a teaching space it still felt separate from the school day and me being a new face there I think allowed the students to see it as such. 

Then, as I've talked about before, I went to RIC for education but ended up in YDEV which was definitely a big milestone in connecting the dots in my journey as a youth worker and showed me the possibilities of what I could do. In my last year of undergrad when we do our internships, I didn't have any local connections to organizations, a lot of my peers were currently working or knew of places where they could intern so it took me a lot longer to find something. I had only had experience working with elementary and middle school students so the first few places I checked out were for K-5 places and I didn't love any of them. I remember talking to Rachael and her suggesting this position for New Urban Arts at a high school and thinking how completely out of my comfort zone that was. But I checked it out anyways and for some reason, it stuck. So for a year, I got to know what it was like to work with high school students in a school.

I didn't know what I was going to do after I graduated with a BA, I still didn't know a lot about working in the YDEV field and NUA didn't have anything open at the time so I went back to my summer college job of making sandwiches for rich people at a beach club. Until Rachael* reached out and sent me a job description for a position she thought I'd be great at for Riverzedge Arts. Riverside was my first full-time youth work job and while there were a lot of things that were not great about the position and the organization it will always hold space for me that way.

I came to a point where I felt it was my time to leave Riverzedge and started looking for positions, this was during a time when COVID had been in our lives for over a year now but it was still affecting looking for jobs that I could support myself on that I would also actually enjoy doing. Luckily it perfectly aligned with when New Urban Arts were looking for a new Site Director for their programs at Central High School where I had interned my senior year in my BA. The most full circle moment I could experience and am very grateful for this job which has led me to get my MA in Youth Development.

*if you couldn't tell I owe A LOT to Rachael for guiding me to great positions twice so far