Community-Based Organizations as Healthy Learning Environments

The East Oakland Youth Development Center (EOYDC) is a community-based, youth-serving organization committed to attending to the emotional, physical, intellectual, and economic well-being of the youth in the East Oakland community for the last 33 years. A community-based participatory research partnership conducted with EOYDC entitled “My Identity is Community (MiC)” explores EOYDC as a site of healthy learning for youth of color who are participants there. Active involvement in EOYDC's programming, cultivation as “youth leaders,” and participation in a qualitative research study empowered the youth to produce poetic texts that make sense of their lives and their home, school, and neighborhood environments. Poetry, and other expressive mechanisms, has been shown to draw out powerful emotions from historically underrepresented groups that other methodologies might not be able to capture. As co-researchers in the study, the young people are acknowledged as “experts” of issues pertaining to their own neighborhood. Additionally, the importance of EOYDC in providing institutional support to the lives of the young people, in the form of caring adult role models, dynamic programming, and a safe space, lends promise to the role that other community-based and youth-serving organizations may have in promoting healthy development.