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| Vision Youth |
 | | in Washington, D.C.
Vision Youth is developing tutoring programs in the metropolitan area that provide caring, trained tutors to help struggling elementary students get a stronger start in school and in life. |
Walking Alongside Youth
At the core of Vision Youth are outreach workers, compassionate adults from the community who know the challenges and issues young people face, and who are committed to providing a caring, stable influence in their lives. They also recruit and arrange training for volunteers who are willing to help carry the burden for these high-risk youth. And most importantly, they provide partner churches with a staff member who can devote his or her energies full time to youth outreach, a luxury few inner-city churches can afford.
Vision Youth begins its journey with children when they are young, by matching struggling elementary school students with trained, adult tutors and mentors from partner churches and community organizations. These tutors provide not only academic help, but also emotional nurture. Sometimes, they are the only stable adult influence in these youngsters’ hard lives.
As young people mature, their needs change and outreach workers like Orlando Bego, who met Mike on New Year’s Eve, take their ministry to parks, schools, juvenile detention halls, and the streets––wherever troubled youth are found. They provide strong role models and the influence of a caring adult who can help young people set goals for the future. They help them find the resources they need to follow through on those goals, whether it’s by providing discipleship or by referring them to an academic specialist, drug-treatment program, counseling, or job training.
Relationships that Last
Orlando hasn’t seen Mike since New Year’s Eve, but he prays he’ll meet him again one day and be able to help him find a new focus for his life. But today he is intent on making a positive impact on the lives of youngsters he can reach—youngsters like Kam, an eighth-grader at a local middle school. Kam was in the dean’s office—again—for a disciplinary hearing. His mother didn’t care enough to attend, so his beleaguered grandmother came instead, missing an opportunity to interview for a job to try to help her troubled grandson.
Orlando knows Kam from his outreach work at the school. He made time in his day to attend the hearing to advocate for the youth. Instead of handing down a 10- to 24-day expulsion, the dean was swayed by Orlando’s suggestion that Kam instead be given an alternative to enroll in a local Boys and Girls Club and an after-school program at his school.
Kam’s grandmother was astonished to learn that Orlando wasn’t a teacher, but an outreach worker devoted to helping kids like her grandson. Afterward, she dissolved in tears as she told Orlando how grateful she was to have someone willing to invest his time and compassion in Kam. She was crying tears of relief as she learned she didn’t have to carry the burden of caring for her grandson alone.
Orlando is still a powerful presence in Kam’s life and continues to help the young man focus his energies more productively and learn to make good decisions.
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