END OF THE LINE FOR DYC
Dorchester Youth Collaborative helped local teens get ahead
The Dorchester Youth Collaborative is shutting its doors after 40 years as the longtime Boston youth center and anti-violence organization becomes another casualty of the pandemic.
Executive Director Emmett Folgert said the board of the DYC — as the beloved Fields Corner center has long been known in the low-income neighborhoods where it has worked — recently voted to shutter after the organization had to cease all programing amid the coronavirus pandemic.
“You read a lot about the restaurants, but you don’t read a lot about the nonprofits,” Folgert told the Herald on Friday.
Folgert, who’s said one of the hallmarks of the DYC is the ability to adapt, switched to food distribution over the summer — but even that became too tricky, having to pile everyone into a car during the pandemic. Their sports programs and community center, the “after-after-school” service meant to help kids in highcrime neighborhoods keep out of trouble, couldn’t make it through the second wave of the pandemic, he said.
“For a year it has been extremely difficult, often impossible for us to operate our programs safely due to the COVID-19 pandemic,” Folgert wrote in a note to friends and supporters. “We are not closing due to a lack of funding, health, or personnel issues. We are closing due to the pandemic.”
Talking on the phone, Folgert choked up, saying it’s been an “honor and a privilege” working with the kids of Dorchester, Roxbury, Mattapan and Jamaica Plain over the decades.
“You’ve got to remember how incredible these kids are, and talented,” Folgert said. “There are as many artists as anywhere else — there just aren’t as many easels.”
The DYC has received various accolades for its work, and Folgert in 2012 was honored at the White House as one of the country’s “Champions of Change” for youth violence prevention. Folgert has done anti-gang work, and the DYC has run a workforce development program he hopes will continue under a different organization. A big chunk of its money also has gone in direct aid to kids — buying them clothes, gear and technology “so they don’t miss opportunities,” he said.
Folgert, who was born in upstate New York in 1950, said he came to Boston for college, and became involved in activism in the 1970s, but, “I realized we just weren’t connecting with working people.” So he started working in neighborhoods fraught with violence, and has stuck with that since — so long that he helped the parents of the kids who are in there now.
And he and the other eight DYC staffers don’t plan to stop, he said.
“As individuals we are still going to advocate for kids from the under-resourced neighborhoods,” Folgert said. “It won’t be as DYC, but I’m not going anywhere.”