Where there is love & inspiration I don’t think you can go wrong: the Bayview-Hunters Point YMCA Community Hub at Hunters View
By Nicole Yarbrough & Alfredo Guardado
Our names are Nicole Yarbrough and Alfredo Guardado of the Bayview-Hunters Point YMCA’s Hunters View Community Hub. As the BVHP YMCA Activities Coordinator, Nicole works in Hunters View coordinating activities and services for the residents of the community. Alfredo is the Hunters View CHI Coordinator. He helps coordinate the efforts of the program, connecting with the academic teachers from the school and making sure they have individual education plans for each student for academic enrichments.
Having the hub at the HOPE SF Hunters View community room has been very beneficial for the kids that are nearby and the ones that don’t live within the community. This offers them a safe place to be. Because of Hunters View’s unique location, the hub has been a space where families can begin to transition back to some normalcy during this time. We encourage parents to stay consistent with the drop off and pick up to reestablish some structure back into the daily schedule.
Being within community has allowed for a trusting connection to develop. The work that Fredo and Nico have done to establish a consistency in their lives within this pandemic has been essential to their growth. They have established connections with teachers to be a bridge to the parents when needed. We have identified the needs of some of the students and took further steps to support their mental health. We are a caring bunch of people, and we have a soft spot for what these children are experiencing and are taking things from a trauma-informed approach.
A Day at the Hub
Students arrive to Hunters View Community Hub ready to learn. When they get here, they are already signed into their computers and class with their breakfast ready. Once they are done with their academics, they transition to lunch. After they read for 15min and do their Academic Enrichment Sheets. We then float around and support each individual student with their Seesaw — homework. We then facilitate recreational activities and enrichments.
Art is a major part of our enrichment activities. We take a project-based approach where each student creates an individual artwork that gets placed into the larger artwork. They work on certain elements together, and then it becomes a larger collective piece. The kids have done drawing, painting, and tie-dye, decorating their individual masks and shirts. For Black History Month, they watched videos of Alma Woodsey Thomas, an African American artist, to learn her process, then each student created their own unique piece.
Some of the challenges we have experienced is the fact that many students have IEPs or 504s who need additional support. In addition, having students from 7 different school and 6 different grade levels is hard. All of their different schedules is hard to balance, but we are doing it.
We have a family who has 2 students with IEPs, and in the middle of the pandemic and the year they were moved from Hunters View. Their guardian really advocated they continue attending our Hub as we have built a positive relationship with the students and have been meeting their needs. She is super happy with our Hub and didn’t want to take them anywhere else. She travels across the city every day to bring them to our Hub.
Is San Francisco still a great place to grow up? Yes and no. There are some benefits to growing up in diverse populations in the realm of socialization and exposure to culture. But the cost of living in SF has made it so hard for families to thrive, and you see it affecting communities like Bayview so much harder than any other part of SF. And the safety in the city makes it not as fun to be a kid in the city. When people don’t feel safe and secure in their homes, there is a constant degree of trauma being inflicted daily.
We need an increase in child therapists due to this last year and current year being truly traumatic for everyone, and offering the kids that service is necessary at this time. We have heard many stories of therapists not showing up for people, adults and kids, during this time, and it feels like an essential part to thriving after this pandemic.
As we struggle and grind through the pandemic, what song motivates you to continue to serve our communities?
Destiny Child, “Survivor” & Gloria Gaynor, “I Will Survive”
To learn more about DCYF’s Community Hub Initiative, visit dcyf.org/care
