Latin American Youth Center

The Latin American Youth Center (LAYC) was founded in the late 1960s to address the absence of services for the emerging Latino community in the Washington, DC area. Originally a small grassroots site in DC’s Columbia Heights neighborhood, today LAYC is one of the nation’s leading youth development organizations with locations in DC and Maryland.

The Center’s mission revolves around helping youth 1) achieve academic success resulting in graduation from high school and at least two years of post-secondary education; 2) secure employment with long-term career potential; and 3) learn the other skills needed to lead a healthy and happy life. To achieve these goals, the Center offers services in the following five areas: Educational Enhancement, Social Services, Workforce Investment & Social Enterprise (WISE), Art + Media and Advocacy/Public Policy. Where LAYC does not offer a needed service, long-standing collaborations with other community-based organizations, public (including government) agencies, clinics, and a range of private service providers allow us to meet each youth’s needs. In FY09, LAYC served over 4,200 individuals in DC and Maryland. The majority of the youth served were Latino, and 15% of the total number of individuals served had immigrated to the U.S. in the last three years.

LAYC’s Art + Media House (AMH) is one of the Center’s programs that aims to develop the power of young people to express positive personal identity, deepen their academic abilities, engage with a variety of cultural traditions, and positively impact issues facing their communities. Each year, over 100 youth call the Art + Media House home every day after school and on weekends to learn about subjects ranging from fine arts to music production.

This past summer, youth produced a number of exhibits that illustrated the knowledge they had learned. Participants created elaborate murals including a wall mosaic at Northwestern High School in Hyattsville, Maryland, and a block-long mural depicting city life that runs along the wall at Harriet Tubman Elementary School in DC. The goal of both efforts was to apply the artistic and teamwork skills youth had learned early in the summer to a group project.

“Projects like these can have a great impact on youths’ lives, showing what can be accomplished if they work with others,” Arturo Ho, lead artist for the Tubman mural, said. “A number of neighborhood residents dropped by to tell the youth how much they liked the finished product.”

AMH also participated in the Art on Call program, a citywide effort to transform Washington’s abandoned police and fire call boxes into neighborhood art icons. The call boxes were installed throughout the city in the 1860s, but became obsolete with the introduction of the 911 emergency call system in the 1970s. AMH participants turned these outmoded systems into works of art associated with the history of the specific neighborhood where they are located.

"At the beginning of the summer, I didn't have any idea of how much I was going to learn,” participant Dolores Portillo said. “The program taught me how to work with others as a team, and about types or art that I knew nothing about.”