Established in 1991, Hyde Square Task Force (HSTF) is a community-based organization that seeks to nurture and amplify the voices, creativity, and power of youth by grounding them in Afro-Latin culture so they can advance justice in their communities. Located in Boston’s Latin Quarter, our neighborhood has long been a home to immigrants from the Caribbean and Latin America. Throughout the organization’s history, HSTF has focused on strengthening the social fabric of our community by taking care of our youths. We bring people together through advocacy, organizing, and Afro-Latin arts.
HSTF’s Jóvenes en Acción (JEA) program trains youth to become citizen artists who combine their artistic practice with civic responsibility. Jóvenes from grades 8-12 train in Afro-Latin dance, music, and theatre, learning how to use their craft as a tool for social change, community building, and cultural expression. A subset of JEA youth become organizers, leading advocacy campaigns on topics such as fair pricing and expanding arts programming in our local public schools.
Alongside this training, youths also participate in structured career exploration and receive academic support to cultivate their interests and aspirations. In recognition of their time and our belief that the arts should be accessible regardless of socioeconomic circumstance (nearly 90% of HSTF participants live in low-income households), youths in Jóvenes en Acción receive a stipend for their participation.
In addition to JEA, HSTF’s Caminos: College and Career Pathways program supports youths as they transition into young adulthood. Caminos is open to participants beginning as early as 11th grade and continuing through the age of 25. Drawing on the postsecondary coaching model that HSTF developed in tandem with the Success Boston Initiative, the Caminos program focuses on developing three pillars for thriving: academic and career success, belonging and engagement, and well-being and life skills.
As part of Caminos, high school youths participate in weekly workshops, while postsecondary participants meet monthly. Recent workshop topics have included avoiding common financial aid application pitfalls, leveraging social and professional networks to stay on track with individual goals, and mitigating risks when asserting free speech rights in service of their values.
Participants in both JEA and Caminos have access as needed to one-on-one academic and career coaching with professional staff, social-emotional support sessions with a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, subject-specific tutoring, and a network of volunteer mentors eager to share insights about their lived and professional experiences.
Over the years, these programs have evolved due to HSTF’s deep commitment to listening to youths. For example, when we learned that youths were leaving Jóvenes en Acción to take afterschool jobs and contribute to household expenses, we increased stipends to offset some of those opportunity costs.
The Caminos program, which launched in 2023, responded to youths’ interests in several key ways. First, the program explicitly welcomed youths from multiple postsecondary pathways, recognizing that the best pathway for a young person depends on their goals. We engage youths who are interested in apprenticeships, short-term training programs, bachelor’s degrees, and more. While most of our participants do pursue and persist in a college pathway, Caminos recognizes that all young adults deserve access to community, cultural grounding, and holistic support as they pursue their postsecondary goals.
Second, the Caminos program aligned our programming for young adults with HSTF’s fundamental belief in the community cultural wealth of Latine communities, as outlined by scholar Tara J. Yosso. We restructured our previous postsecondary support program to connect participants with cultural events and create regular opportunities for peer-to-peer connections. Peers and alumni remain invaluable sources of navigational, social, and resistant capital for our participants. We are continuing to strengthen connections with Caminos participants’ familia– including parents, guardians, and loved ones of all stripes–to foreground the linguistic, familial, and aspirational capital that our youths carry with them.
Third, we listened to HSTF alumni and current participants who expressed that maintaining their connections through moments of transition alleviated significant stress, while additional transitions seemed to exacerbate that stress. At a time when many local organizations scaled back their postsecondary supports to focus on students in their first or second year of college, HSTF explicitly expanded its participation window up to age 25. Inviting our participants to maintain their connections with staff and peers throughout their young adulthood has provided stability and familiarity through particularly challenging moments, such as graduating from college and transitioning into a new job, ascending the career ladder, or navigating new caretaking responsibilities. Seeing their near-peers successfully navigate moments of transition bolsters the confidence of many of our young adults, especially those who are among the first in their families to attend college or to navigate early career steps in the U.S.
Finally, HSTF created a Self-Advocacy Fund. Participants tell our staff what would best enable them to expand their career opportunities, deepen their community connections, and fulfill their commitments to remain engaged as civic participants. With a maximum of $500 per year per participant, Caminos participants have accessed Self-Advocacy Funds for a wide range of goals: obtaining an ID, passing a driver’s test, paying down student loans, purchasing required textbooks, joining a club on campus, and presenting at a professional conference. Our organization has learned immensely from those requests, and has even been able to direct additional resources toward pervasive challenges in our community, such as food insecurity.
Our team is proud of the outcomes that Jóvenes en Acción and Caminos participants have achieved, the lives they are building for themselves, and the futures they are creating for our communities. More than 95% of Caminos participants reported feeling connected to their culture and community as a result of their participation with HSTF. Over 85% of youths improved their skills such as critical thinking, creativity, and leadership last year. Many of our current 12th grade students have already submitted college applications and are on track to matriculate in Fall 2026. Several participants who started college this fall are attending on full-tuition scholarships. Last year, over 90% of postsecondary participants persisted in their pathway, and more than 80% of all college-goers made Satisfactory Academic Progress. A young adult who has just crossed the halfway point in his carpentry apprenticeship recently purchased his first home. Another graduated with a bachelor’s degree, earning honors, and started a full-time job as a patient advocate at a pediatric health clinic in Boston’s Latin Quarter. Many of our young adult participants eagerly volunteer to speak with our high school youths about their experiences and pathways, already demonstrating how they show up for others in their community. HSTF participants are not merely getting ahead, they are also giving back.
At the end of each program session, we ask participants to reflect on their experiences at HSTF. Here is what a few respondents wrote that HSTF means to them, and the changes they’ve seen as a result of participating in JEA and Caminos:
- “Since I began, I have seen more confidence in myself as [a] person and taking pride in my culture and where I come from. I have also seen more confidence in myself as a leader. This means speaking up for what I believe in, challenging ideas, and so much more.”
- “Totalmente una forma de reconocer que con esfuerzo puedes lograr grandes cosas. Por el otro lado entiendo más mi relación con mi cultura y raíces; y [me] conecto más con ella.”
- “How much fun I have. I forget that life can be fun sometimes with all the stress of school but Hyde Square [Task Force] always seems to remind me of that. And bring the color and vibrancy back into my life.”
By investing in connections to Afro-Latin culture, postsecondary planning, and Latine community cultural wealth, HSTF envisions our community thriving and fully represented in Boston’s leadership and culture.
About the author
Brittney Lewer is the Education Programs Manager at Hyde Square Task Force. They are an educator with more than a decade of experience in teaching, research, and program design. A proud first-generation college student, Brittney recently earned their Ph.D. in the History of Education.
