
By Hena Vadher, AmeriCorps Promise Fellow at Breakthrough Twin Cities
"Like many of my students, Rob has experienced pretty extreme trauma as a result of firsthand experiences with poverty and death. He works with his school's counselor, but he still struggles with anxiety and depression. He often practices coping through absence, and will skip school, Breakthrough, etc.
After we started meeting, he came to his first Saturday Session all year in January, after skipping the end of Breakthrough's summer session and largely falling off the radar. He attended after I asked him if he would attend, and gave him all of the relevant information he would need to show up. The session was hard for him, as they're often high energy and he struggles to participate in that way. Moreover, he has few friends he feels close to at Breakthrough. I suspected that it might be difficult to convince Rob to come to another Saturday Session.