Eight teenagers were honored Monday for completing life skills training and goal-setting exercises through the City of Danville’s Project Imagine collaborative, which works to steer youths away from gang activity and community violence.
Graduating were Kaylin Averett, Zi-era Beck, Tavion Buskey, Ian Calloway, Martevis Henry-Calloway, Saniah Lyons, Christian Motley, and Christopher Motley.
Robert David, violence prevention manager for the City of Danville and head of Project Imagine, commended the graduates for going through the program.
“It is our responsibility as adults to help you on your journey,” David said. “We are going to do whatever we have to do to make sure you make it home to your parents every day, to make sure you see your 18th birthday, and to make sure that you have the life you want. It is our duty, our call, and our passion to help you be successful in every layer of life.”
David and his staff tag the phrase “your new aunts and uncles,” meaning that they will serve as a support system for the youths.
“We are going to hold you accountable as well, just like aunts and uncles would,” David said. “If you do something, we are going to make sure you know about it, but then we are going to move on. We don’t hold it over your head. We say, ‘how do we fix this situation.’ You are walking into an organization that cares. As an organization, our emphasis is to get you to imagine the life that maybe you could not imagine before.”
The program steers youths away from gang activity and community violence by developing and maintaining relationships with mentors, and by focusing on goals such as having no contact with law enforcement, improving their grades, completing school, and becoming employed.
As part of the program, the youths receive strength-based assessments using the Casey Life Skills and Clifton Strengths tools. These tools are used to place youths on a path toward developing healthy, productive lives.
Also, a Project Imagine outreach worker is assigned to mentor each youth for a minimum of one year.
Project Imagine is based on the evidence-based theory of Cognitive Behavior Therapy in that if the youth can implement new information and standards, then he or she can change their behavior. The idea is that the program creates a positive "image" in the mind of a youth so that they he or she can "imagine" a life without gangs or crime.
The teens in Project Imagine are chosen from referrals from the police department, courts, schools, and parents. Since the program’s inception, 22 classes, totaling more than 125 teens, have graduated.
David and the Project Imagine collaborative have received national recognition. Earlier this month, David received the 2023 Youth Workforce Professional of the Year Award from the National Association of Workforce Development Professionals.
In January of this year, David was named among the “Top 100 Influencers in Local Government” in 2022 by the nonprofit Engaging Local Government Leaders.
In 2020, David was named a winner of the Frederic Milton Thrasher Award by the National Gang Crime Research Center. The award recognizes his accomplishments in gang prevention and intervention.
The collaborative received the President’s Award from the Virginia Municipal League in October 2019.