Voices of Change:
Partner Stories from Across California

Through these powerful testimonial videos, our partners share their perspectives and experiences working within their communities to uplift youth leadership and advocate for systemic change.

Nathaniel Patterson
Kids in the Spotlight

The Center’s Elevate Youth California partner, Nathaniel Patterson from Kids in the Spotlight, shares how their programming meets youth where they’re at while engaging them with substance use education and policy change awareness.

“Elevate Youth California has opened a lot of opportunities for us and other youth to pursue whatever we’re deeply connected with. We’re working on our documentary and while we’re doing so we’re creating these video curriculums for our youth and engaging in this mutual aid network with foster youth so they can watch and be educated about substance use, antipsychotics in specific, and mobilize them so they can be equipped with the tools for policy and advocacy so that they’re the main ones in the forefront.”

Teri Carlyle
Urban Strategies Council

The Center’s Elevate Youth California partner, Teri Carlyle from Urban Strategies Council, talks about the ways in which their programming spreads the word widely about opioid use prevention and they travel wherever they’re needed to share education and resources.

“Urban Strategies, we are everywhere trying to spread the word on opioid use prevention. So we go into the middle schools, the high schools, we have been asked to come to the colleges, we go to youth led organizations, transitional homes, family reunions, encampments. We are everywhere trying to serve our communities, because we are trying to stop the overdose deaths. We just want people to know that if you need us, we will come and we come for free and we come bearing gifts and we come bearing information. And we’re getting Narcann in the hands of all the kids and the adults. We’re getting fentanyl test strips in the hands of everyone.”

Victor Hugo Marroquin
REACH LA

The Center’s Elevate Youth California partner, Victor Hugo from REACH LA, explains why it’s important to understand the social conditions and challenges that queer and trans youth of color experience and how REACH LA’s programming takes a holistic wellness approach to education around substance use.

“It’s a very hard time to be a queer and trans person and add the addition of being a person of color, being a person who is racialized, add to the fact that that is very expensive to live right now. Survival is very real at the end of the day and I know that was my experience in highschool, is that I couldn’t really fully be myself and so many of our youth, many of the folks who happen to be, our first experience our first way that we can escape that is through substances and we do that in a way that we start developing dependencies, and we’re just not given the opportunity to define what health and wellness can look like for us. I think it’s very important for an organization like ourselves that we have that holistic wellness aspect. Because even as we’re engaging and having these conversations about sexual health and wellness, it doesn’t have to be desensitized and really scientific, it can be fun and it can be engaging. It doesn’t have to be clinical.”