Sometimes I wonder why, out of every city, town, and suburb in the entire country of the United States, my grandmother chose to move to Lynn, Massachusetts. A city otherwise rich in history, but unluckily dubbed over by an ingloriously annoying jingle, “Lynn, Lynn, city of sin, you’ll never come out the way you came in.” I heard it chanted through elementary school hallways, mocked by middle school kids, and hummed by high schoolers. You would think its omnipresence would keep away travelers, but, then again, my grandmother didn’t speak English. She came over from the Dominican Republic thirty-six years ago, with my mother and her five other kids. She was single, couldn’t speak English, and only went to school up to the third grade.
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In the spring, they helped me run a clothing drive for Cradles To Crayons with my school and I even went to a reunion where we joined together again in Gillette Stadium and did community service. In the fall, when high school started, I heard about a peer leadership program at Girls Inc., an after school program I’d been attending since elementary school. Coming back from the experience of Project 351, I decided to apply. A week later, I found out I got in. The program was called Part of the Solution (POS). For the first time, I was working with teens from my city who were older and more experienced than me. I didn’t feel out of place though, because everyone there was passionate and cared about what they were doing. We planned events for teens to have them engage with their community and to provide them with a healthier alternative than, say, spending their Friday night doing drugs. In addition to advocating for preventing drug abuse, we also advocate against big tobacco companies who target youth. We spent weeks gathering data and making a PowerPoint which explained all the changes we wanted made in Lynn, such as raising the minimum age of buying tobacco from 18 to 21. I even had to present this PowerPoint in front of the city council with three of my peers. It was nerve racking, but also
In the spring, they helped me run a clothing drive for Cradles To Crayons with my school and I even went to a reunion where we joined together again in Gillette Stadium and did community service. In the fall, when high school started, I heard about a peer leadership program at Girls Inc., an after school program I’d been attending since elementary school. Coming back from the experience of Project 351, I decided to apply. A week later, I found out I got in. The program was called Part of the Solution (POS). For the first time, I was working with teens from my city who were older and more experienced than me. I didn’t feel out of place though, because everyone there was passionate and cared about what they were doing. We planned events for teens to have them engage with their community and to provide them with a healthier alternative than, say, spending their Friday night doing drugs. In addition to advocating for preventing drug abuse, we also advocate against big tobacco companies who target youth. We spent weeks gathering data and making a PowerPoint which explained all the changes we wanted made in Lynn, such as raising the minimum age of buying tobacco from 18 to 21. I even had to present this PowerPoint in front of the city council with three of my peers. It was nerve racking, but also