Promise Fellows

Rob Reaches Out

April 11, 2018
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. […]
Rob Reaches Out

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.

However, this month, without my prompting, he reached out to me via text and asked for his busing information to make sure he could make the February Saturday Session. This incredible change came at a time when he was struggling to show up to school every day, and I could not have been more proud of him for advocating for himself - of his own volition."
[From “Voices From the Field: Reflections from Minnesota Alliance With Youth’s AmeriCorps Members.” Spring 2018.]