Youth
Current Youth Activities
Drop-In Center/Sports
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3x a week
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Football / Basketball / Chess / Academics
Youth BBQ
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After School Wednesdays at San Antonio Park Rec Center
Youth Night
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1st and 3rd Fridays, 5-7pm
Paid Internships
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Summer (ages 14-18)
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Year-Round Weekend internships (ages 16+)
College Tours/Retreats
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Year-Rounds Visits
Text YOUTH to (510) 985-9915 to sign up for notifications
Trybe provides hard-to-reach youth with essential life and workplace skills training, consistent mentors, after-school enrichment programs, retreats, college/career trips, and activities. These experiences build self-esteem, character, healthy relationships, and facilitate (re)connection to their communities. It is all about belonging and building confidence which comes from knowing one has a place.
Youth need victories. Young men and women in East Oakland do not experience enough victory in their lives. Trybe exists to facilitate spaces where young people and families can get one win because we believe that one victory begets another. A string of victories creates sustainability, where families experience enough good for an unbroken period of time to actually break vicious cycles of poverty, addiction, abuse, and violence. The first victories are often in something physical, which leads to mental, educational, economic, emotional, spiritual, and relational victories.
Trybe's programs start with a big tent model where youth walk through the wide doors of weekly BBQs and drop-in activities in the park central to eight schools. There is a formula of no-cost low bar activities, exciting and adrenaline-inducing attractions, and mentors who grew up in the neighborhood. Youth then join at deeper levels, sports teams and skills workshops, combative classes, and tutoring sessions. Mentors enter campus, classrooms, vice principal offices, school yards, and family homes and housing complexes to fully wrap around arm's reach. Paid college, career, leadership internship opportunities and large community-building events complete the recipe as low-income youth desperately need money in their pockets often to help pay the family bills. And after a year or years of this happening, indigenous leaders are developed from youth who were once roaming the halls and streets.
We hear from youth how much Trybe mentors mean to them, but not often in words. The calls, texts, tears, hugs, screams of anger, showing up on our doorsteps, devouring food, and not showing up ghosting mentors are all taken as precious, a trust to be held with care. When tested, it is re-engaging with love, a listening ear, with the long-term in mind, a hope to dream for the child when they no longer dream, and always without judgment or criticism. These relationships are what radical acceptance and true belonging is, and it is what makes Trybe's "program" transformational.