The Rural We: Ananda Timpane
The executive director of Railroad Street Youth Project (RSYP) dishes about the nonprofit's successes on its 20th anniversary.
Southern Berkshire County native Ananda Timpane is the executive director of Railroad Street Youth Project (RSYP), a nonprofit organization based in Great Barrington, Mass. RSYP was started in 1999 by Amanda Root, a teenager at the time, in response to the drug- and alcohol-related deaths of young people in the Southern Berkshire community. RSYP now runs mentoring and apprenticeship programs, provides sexual health programming through the local schools, offers job training and career counseling, and staffs an active drop-in center that provides counseling, mediation, referrals and advocacy services for young people in need. RSYP will be celebrating its 20th anniversary at its popular Culinary Arts Apprenticeship Dinner fundraiser on Saturday, Dec. 7 at Crissey Farm in Great Barrington.
What’s exciting and unique to the area is that we are a youth-founded youth organization and everything flows from that. Our mission is to empower youth and we invite the community in to foster intergenerational projects so that youth is valued and they are looked to as leaders. As a society, we often see youth leadership as something that seems good for other youth but we’re thinking bigger than that — what a world could look like if youth could lead all of us. It’s happening globally in a way that’s really visible right now, from the youth council at Standing Rock which has expanded into other climate action to the Parkland students.
RSYP is a way for young people to explore their interests. Our drop-in center has expanded to the skate park across the street, and young people come as they are to these places, connect with peers and staff, and surface support and information.
The population of 12- to 25-year-olds in South County is around 1,500, and we serve 700-800 in that age group annually. Last year we developed an online education series, co-produced with BRIDGE. There are eight videos, with one tip per video, about how to have a challenging conversation with your teen. So far, we’ve had more than 1,000 views, so we’re reaching a huge percentage of the population.
We’re excited to be piloting, with CHP, VIM and a host of other doctors, a mobile teen health clinic, which will be located on school district grounds on Mondays and at the drop-in center on Thursdays. Some teens are struggling with mental health, some just want to talk to a doctor. We don’t have a reproductive health clinic in South County, so this fills some gaps. It’s a barrier-free way for them to seek help when they need it.
Our mentoring program serves about 50 young people annually, with the apprenticeships program serving 60-70 youths a year. The apprenticeships can be anything where someone locally wants to share their passion with young people. We’ve done computer programming, animal care, and cosmetology with Mulberry Hair Co., and we can always add new 8-week apprenticeships.
In 2007, a group of young women and staff got together to offer, in collaboration with the schools, evidence-based sex education classes. We track these things, and the impact has been so positive over the last 10 years — unplanned pregnancies, unprotected sex, and risky behaviors have dropped significantly.
We’re also the home of the South Berkshire Community Health Coalition, where more than 70 groups and young adults are involved, in the Berkshire Hills and Southern Berkshire School Districts, on creating health and wellness, and reducing and preventing underage substance use. We do a lot of work around parent education, holding half-day trainings for parents who have an active worry about a young person’s substance use. Young people are not getting clear information about drugs and alcohol, and the message they get from peers is a favorable one. Our work is to put more information on the table, so adults and teens can make the decisions they really want to make.
Our 20th anniversary year kicked off with block party last spring, and next summer we’ll close out the year with a celebratory event. It’s a huge thing because it was originally 40 or 50 young people and a couple of adults who got together and said ‘What would happen if we put power into the hands of young adults?’ and we got a really cool experiment.
