VIDEO: A peek inside the youth center
Read the video’s transcript:
The Pine Ridge Reservation is home to the Oglala Lakota Nation, a place shaped by deep history, strong traditions, and generations of resilience. It is also a place where many families face serious barriers. Food insecurity, inadequate housing, and limited access to transportation and other basic resources affect everyday life here. But those circumstances do not define the people of Pine Ridge. This is a community filled with culture, creativity, humor, strength, and people who continue showing up for one another.
Allen is a small community located in the eastern part of the reservation. It is home to families who care deeply about their children and want them to have every opportunity to learn, grow, and imagine a future for themselves. But growing up in a remote community can be difficult. Young people need safe places to spend their time. They need healthy food, positive activities, dependable adults, and opportunities to discover what they are capable of. Most of all, they need to know that they matter. That is why the Allen Youth Center exists.
When I arrive to the Allen Youth Center each day, my goal is to provide these kids with security, a safe place for them to be, somewhere that only belongs to them. Operated by One Spirit, the Allen Youth Center is a place where children can come exactly as they are. They do not have to earn the right to be here or explain what may be happening in their lives. They can eat a meal, take a shower, wash their clothes, play basketball, make art, finish their homework, or simply have a safe place to exist for a while.
On any given day, the center may be filled with kids cooking, making pottery or slime, playing basketball, creating art, laughing with their friends or sitting down for a conversation with an adult they trust on a typical afternoon i think you could witness a variety of things from fried bread making to breaking down buffalo to tick tock videos being recorded slime being made overall just a lot of laughter probably music that is way too loud and kids just being kids
The Youth Center also operates a food pantry that serves more than 40 local families each month, while the center itself provides food for anywhere from 10 to 40 children a day. These services meet immediate needs, but the heart of the Allen Youth Center is about something even bigger, belonging. At the Allen Youth Center, I believe kids receive a variety of things from positive mentorship, communication building, There's a lot of empowerment that goes on with both the staff and youth to youth. Overall, they get a friend.
I think some of the challenges that a lot of these families face from an outside perspective would be just how rural it is, how really out in the middle of nowhere we are. Also, there's not a lot of employment here. This is a food desert. It's very hard to grow crops out here. We don't see a lot of rain. I do think that that makes a lot of the hardships that these families face out of their control to an extent. It is hard to get help here.
When I first started working here, I made it a priority to put out a community voice survey. to the community members in Allen to figure out what it was truly that they wanted to see and what they needed. And one of the questions on there read, what could we do here at the Allen Youth Center to help you feel more safe? And we got a response on there from a child that simply stated that the Allen Youth Center is the only place that I feel safe. And that was when I had a realization that the work that we're doing here really matters.
Even the smallest donations at the Allen Youth Center go such a long way. When we receive glue donations, for example, to make slime, that is an entire afternoon now that I get to pull 20 to 30 kids into the AC and they get to be creative for the rest of the afternoon. If a single basketball is donated, that one basketball, now we can have a tournament outside and they can be competitive in a positive way. The small, I mean markers, paints, any of that, it provides an entire afternoon of creativity for these kids.
We want every child who walks through these doors to feel seen, heard, and wanted. We want them to understand that this is not simply a building adults created for them. This is their youth center, and their voices should shape what it becomes.
