Connection - Family Partnership: Protect the Dream

By Victor Monterrosa, Jr. ‘07

Protect the Dream Youth Program (PTDYP) was established during the summer of 2006 with a vision of creating a space for Poughkeepsie’s youth, particularly males. The program is dynamic and changes as new challenges arise and the schedules of the youth and volunteers change. Today, Protect the Dream is an after-school program for male and female youth from ages eight to eighteen that provides dinner, homework help and tutoring, outdoor and indoor games, arts and crafts, library time, two basketball teams, and community events. Its resilience and tenacity can be accredited to the fact that the volunteers and the participants cannot sustain the program’s activity singularly by providing a venue, staff, or funding, but in union have created a formidable force that has obtained and coordinated resources, making it well known in the city.

Protect the Dream encourages academic achievement, teamwork, community participation, and physical and mental activity outside of school. However, even though our youth participants can take part in these activities from Monday through Saturday, the need for volunteers is urgent. Currently there are few students of color that serve as role models for youth participants – a need which the board wishes to fill in order to provide youth participants with examples of similar young men and women who are in college. It is one thing for youth participants to play with each other, which most already do at school or at home, but it is quite different for them to share time with people they can look up to and hold accountable for attendance. Moreover, the lack of volunteers has placed several projects on hold, such as a Black History Month play, a step team, a girls’ basketball team, and a reading program.

This program is special because it is built and run by people who are personally invested in their own communities. The program’s mostly African American, working-class Board of Directors - many who serve as volunteers on a daily basis – represent the visionaries and the movers and shakers the city of Poughkeepsie has to offer.

Get involved today! Send me an email at vimonterrosa@vassar.edu or contact Dave Hargett at ghanadh@yahoo.com and let us know what time you can volunteer from 3:30 pm - 6:00 pm from Monday to Friday or on Saturdays for basketball from 9:00 am – 2:00 pm. You can also work with Protect the Dream through fieldwork, an independent study, or student employment by means of the community service work study program, but that option is limited in space. You want to participate, so act immediately!

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