Gratitude in Motion Read online

  I was still in the midst of my exploration when something happened that changed my whole perspective: September 11.

  Chapter 3

  The Youth Center

  T​HE TERRORIST ATTACKS OF September 11, 2001, changed the country and the world in irrevocable ways—and on a more microcosmic scale, rocked my life.

  I was still living in Vermont then, and for months I’d been having vivid dreams that felt very real. In the early morning hours that day, I dreamed that I was covered in rubble and couldn’t breathe. I awoke in a panic and it took me a while to get myself going.

  It was just a dream, I told myself. Get on with your day.

  But I couldn’t shake it. Even as I made myself coffee, I looked down at my hands and felt like I saw the gray dust of the rubble, almost an out-of-body experience. I turned on the television and a plane had already hit the first tower.

  And I had to go to work.

  People were dying, I felt like I’d had a vision of it in my sleep and couldn’t do anything to prevent it, and somehow I was supposed to clock in like it was any other day. I walked to work at the credit union, as usual, and I sat down at my desk and turned on the computer, trying to pretend that this could be anything like a normal workday. The banking industry had to go on. Conference calls and meetings were still happening. People were still calling about getting loans. Suddenly everything felt so trivial, and I began crying.

  “I need to go home,” I told my supervisor.

  It was a morning when the whole world learned how fragile human life could be. The dating and drinking and period of discovery that had felt like my right felt so stupid now. I was watching the first responders on the news and feeling so personally helpless. The hatred that had driven these images tore me apart. What was I doing to combat any of this? How was my life serving any greater good? Working in human resources for corporate America was not improving the world.

  Over the next few weeks I had a real paradigm shift. There was no time in this world for living a comfortable life, I decided. Getting through it day to day was not enough. I was working my way up in human resources and making a pretty good living, but it was time to figure out something more meaningful.

  The man I was dating at the time, Paul, was an adjunct professor at the University of Vermont, and he knew of an organization active on campus that might be right for me: AmeriCorps.

  It’s like a domestic version of the Peace Corps. AmeriCorps is a nonprofit organization aimed at improving American communities, providing support and funding to programs in a variety of areas, including health, education, economic development, job training, public safety, and the environment. I reviewed their website and filled out an application to work with youth in need.

  You can sign up for one or two years of service, and the organization will cover your basic needs, providing a living stipend that’s right at the poverty level and health care, along with any training and certifications you need. Plus, it offers a good education stipend—$10,000 per year—which was attractive to me because I had higher hopes than community college. I could also apply for matching grants to double that figure. And because AmeriCorps offered only a living stipend, not an income, I also qualified for about $200 worth of food stamps per month; the instructions for applying were right in the AmeriCorps application.

  The director of the state’s substance abuse prevention group within AmeriCorps reviewed my résumé.

  “This would be a step down for you in terms of where you are in your career.”

  “That’s not something that worries me. I’m ecstatic to be here.”

  “What population do you hope to serve?” she asked.

  “Teenagers,” I answered. “I feel like support is so crucial during that time period.”

  I thought about all I had learned in therapy and how much I wanted to help pass along my newfound understanding to other kids who might have been struggling with their identities, family acceptance, or other issues. My life had been so narrow until then, without much diversity or understanding of other backgrounds. I liked the idea of not only opening myself up to meet different kinds of people, but helping facilitate that in others, too.

  Teenage years can be so self-centered—and I don’t mean that as an insult. It’s just that those years are so much about self-discovery and independence that teens can become very myopic. What I hoped to instill in kids was the idea that part of our self-esteem, part of what is best about us, is found in what we do in service of others.

  They found me the perfect position. Through AmeriCorps, in 2002 I began volunteering at a youth center in St. Albans, Vermont, that we soon renamed Common Ground. The center didn’t have much going on—it was open only a couple of days a week and was deeply in debt, with no paid staff, only volunteers. It was in desperate need of funding and programs. That’s where I came in; I signed on for a two-year term to write grant applications and find programs to help combat community problems like substance abuse and teen pregnancy. I didn’t have much context for substance abuse, but I got significant training through the program.

  In addition, I was also able to take more training through the Red Cross so that I was certified to teach CPR, HIV/AIDS education, babysitting safety training, lifeguarding, and more. I took whatever courses interested me and felt relevant, and even became a volunteer EMT on the weekends.

  Soon after I was hired, we began opening the center three days a week, but it wasn’t all that busy. Finally some of the kids opened up to me about the fact that the center had been known as a place for dorky kids and misfits, and maybe it would take some time to attract more of a crowd. I increased my efforts to make it “cool,” making sure we were offering a variety of activities aimed at the jocks, the hippies, the nerds, and everyone in between. And the kids responded. They started showing up one by one and in groups, peeking in tentatively for the first time and deciding to stick around. This was going to be a safe haven for so many of them, and they didn’t even know it yet.

  Before long we were busy enough to open five days a week—plus take the kids on weekend trips. My job was multifaceted and included searching for funding, mentoring kids, running programs for them, managing volunteers, public speaking, traveling with our kids, tutoring (everything but math!)…within just a few months, there was so much going on there, and I helped to build it all.

  It was an exciting time, made even more so by the fact that Paul proposed and we got married after we’d been dating for two years. I was afraid to take that leap, but also captivated by his free spirit. We came from very different backgrounds—his family was loud and liberal and Jewish, very loving and also very educated. They all lived nearby. Paul and I had a lot in common, like our love for dogs and our concern for the environment, but we also clashed sometimes over things like spirituality and the idea of wanting kids. He didn’t want any, and I didn’t think I did, either…at first. But that changed for me with time, and I hoped it would change for him, too.

  One of the nicest parts of our relationship was that Paul often helped at the youth center. We had lots of regulars who showed up after school. Many of them started coming around really just because they didn’t have anywhere else to go until their parents got home from work.

  Several took leadership training so that they could volunteer at the center assisting other kids. They helped with greeting new people, making sure everyone signed in, cleaning the facility, researching programs and grants, everything. Lots of them came from difficult backgrounds, but we worked on choosing positive mind-sets in the face of adversity. When you realize that you don’t always have control over your circumstances, but you do have control over your outlook, it can be empowering. We could always look for hope together.

  What struck me was that our differences didn’t make us so different after all. Teenagers are teenagers. The circumstances and the outsides might not look alike, but at heart, we were so much more a part of one another than not. We wanted love, respect, something to belong to, someth
ing to feel proud of, something that felt our own.

  These kids’ lives were often chaotic, and I imagined myself as a tree, planting myself deep in their lives, providing the reliable support and roots that they needed. It was such an honor to be accepted that way. I was not much older than some of them, but it was a parental role, and I deeply loved and appreciated it. For the first time, I felt like my life had real meaning and that I was fulfilling the role I was meant to play.

  We depended on grant money to run the center. Our state senator Bernie Sanders was passionate about youth and helping to lift people in lower socioeconomic brackets, so he was wonderful to work with and gladly took meetings with me to discuss how the state could help boost our efforts.

  “I have federal earmark money for community improvement left over. Write me a proposal,” he said at one of our first meetings.

  After writing up a strong plan and explanation of our services and gathering tons of letters of recommendation, we got three years of funding based on that conversation.

  We started an organic garden so there would always be healthy food for the kids—they’d often go outside and dig up potatoes and bring them in so I could cook them and top them with some sour cream or cheese donated by Cabot Creamery. We had a lot of in-kind donations like that.

  Over the summer we started a hiking club, and the kids formed a basketball program open to schools in the surrounding area. The music program was our most popular, though. We’d have alternative music nights once a week, and open up the space for band practice twice a week.

  We built a stage and got amps and a couple of donated guitars, bongo drums, and microphones. It was a great place where kids could jam without getting yelled at for being too loud or not sounding good enough. (Vermont has some pretty cool neighbors, and we tried to keep the ending times respectful.) They’d have outdoor concerts in the summer, staged on a flatbed truck borrowed from a farmer, hard-core rocking out in the middle of a field with a generator in tow.

  And the kids themselves…oh, the kids! I loved them all. I didn’t know that I would as much as I did. They all had stories, and if you didn’t respect how hard so many of them were working just to be okay, just to get through every day and be as amazing and positive as they were, you really weren’t paying attention. They were the next group of heroes in my life.

  Gail was one who particularly stood out. From a young age, she was around adults with drug, alcohol, and gambling addictions. Gail didn’t know her own father and she had inconsistent father figures—the only steady male figure in her life was an uncle. The family also struggled financially; even with welfare and state assistance, she and her siblings never seemed to have the basics, and she had to help raise her baby sister.

  She lived about two blocks away from the Common Ground building and heard all the hubbub about a new youth center, so she walked in one day when she was twelve.

  Initially she was quiet, but once Paul and I were able to show her we weren’t leaving and that we cared greatly for her, she bloomed. She participated in almost all of our activities, our youth council, and any outreach where I needed her. She became my little sister.

  Paul and I had about two acres of land that we tilled and used to grow organic produce—primarily as a hobby, but also to sell at farmers’ markets and area restaurants. We found work for Gail to do on our farm for a little money, and some days she’d sleep over at our house. Paul and I even discussed trying to adopt her, though we knew her mother would not give up parental rights.

  Once she called in a heap of tears in the middle of the night. Even though I couldn’t make out what she was saying, obviously something was devastatingly wrong. After a few moments she was able to get out that her uncle had attempted suicide earlier that day. Her family was a mess.

  Just by chance, she had been riding in a car past her uncle’s house and saw that there were police, fire trucks, and an ambulance outside his home. She told me how she’d watched Fireman Joe (a well-known local fire prevention officer and EMT) perform CPR on her uncle before the ambulance crew brought him to the hospital. They’d gotten a pulse back, but he was not conscious. Gail was devastated as she waited for news. A couple of days later, her uncle was disconnected from the ventilators, and the funeral was held shortly after.

  Looking back, this was the most critical point in Gail’s life. It solidified her decision not to go down the path that her family had followed.

  “I want to be a paramedic and firefighter like Fireman Joe,” she told me.

  “I believe in you completely,” I told her. “Just tell us how we can support you.”

  We knew she would not have family to bring her to college tours, or to help her fill out hours of paperwork and apply for financial aid. The Vermont Student Assistance Corporation came through for her, enabling her to be the first person in her family to go to college.

  She was accepted at the only program she wanted to attend: Southern Maine Community College’s fire science program. Paul and I were ecstatic. Her mother said nothing.

  “You’re going to do great things. Just stay true to yourself and go after your goals, and you’ll get there,” I said.

  I cannot imagine the fortitude it took for this young woman to choose to walk away and create an entirely different life from the one she was expected to fall into. It was hard to say goodbye, but she kept in close touch, letting me know how well school was going and how she felt like all the students there were becoming a family.

  Paul’s cousin Jason was another amazing person who came into my life at this time. A filmmaker in South Africa who had worked with famous visionaries, he had done a lot of peace activism, and I was thrilled when he visited us for a week. We got into a conversation about the nonprofit he was working with in South Africa called PeaceJam, through which he had come to know the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

  PeaceJam’s slogan is “Nobel Peace Laureates Mentoring Youth to Change the World.” The whole idea was to educate kids about the world’s best peace leaders, and encourage them to then use their knowledge to expand their cultural horizons, become more compassionate, and improve their communities. At the culmination of the program, the kids would go to a conference to actually meet and interact with one of the thirteen Nobel Peace Prize laureates who were involved with the organization—possibly from nearby, possibly from the other side of the world. It was a curriculum implemented in some schools and community programs, covering elementary through college students.

  “That sounds so meaningful. What a great way to get kids to think about the world outside their town and become more empathetic,” I said.

  “You know, it’s in the U.S., too. I wonder if there are any programs in Vermont,” he said.

  We checked online, but the closest one was in Massachusetts.

  One of Jason’s projects was a short film. He had written a line of music with his partner and then filmed people all over the world playing it with whatever instruments they wanted, in whatever style they wanted. Then he edited the video to blend all of them together, a showcase of different cultures uniting.

  “Can I show it at your teen center one night and have a discussion about it?” he asked me.

  “Uh…yeah!”

  The kids were fascinated with him—this big Jewish hippie guy with a South African accent made quite an impression. They asked him all kinds of questions and he told them about PeaceJam.

  “They have a website where you can sign up to start a program,” he said, and as soon as the words came out of his mouth, I knew I was in trouble.

  The kids looked at me with big eyes.

  “Please? Pleeease, Colleen? Can we start it here?”

  “We already have a lot of programs here. I’m in over my head writing grant applications…” I started, but it was a hard thing to fight against. I mean, how do you resist kids giving you doe eyes about learning peace?

  “The only way I’ll agree to this is if you guys train with me and we launch this together.”


  They were over the moon.

  I went to a PeaceJam conference in Massachusetts to start the process of facilitator training. The first conference I attended with the kids was at a local college with Jody Williams, honored in 1997 for her work on the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. It was hardly her only civil activism work, though—she had been tirelessly campaigning for human rights since the Vietnam War.

  The kids were so impressed with her, and what was even better was that she was from a small town in Vermont. There’s something wonderful about seeing greatness and finding it accessible. This woman was from right here. She was not born a celebrity and bore no special markings on her forehead destining her for a life of importance. She was someone who had gone to a school like theirs and had friends like theirs and decided to make her life matter.

  The funny thing, too, is that she wasn’t what you might expect from a perpetual do-gooder—she wasn’t prim or proper, she wasn’t a “Kumbaya” person; she was passionate and angry and she sometimes used swear words. The kids, of course, thought that was outstanding.

  One of them turned to me in astonishment and said, “She’s a totally normal person.”

  I smiled. “Just like you and me.”

  “She’s amazing!”

  It reminded me of the misconceptions people have about peace activists. Advocating for nonviolence doesn’t mean that we’re flighty people who just want to carry around sunflowers all day and pretend the world is perfect. This kind of work doesn’t mean one isn’t angry. You can be angry—very angry—and still want to solve problems without weapons and warfare. In fact, there are so many things in this society that we should be angry about. As I like to say, peace is not for the weak.

  There were about four hundred kids and fifty mentors at the conference, and Jody did a great job of getting them fired up. We talked about things that were going on right here in our community and then things that were going on in faraway places like Sudan that the kids had probably never thought much about. How could we draw parallels? How could we find root causes to work on to create sustainable change? It was so powerful.