Two friends bring Resilience to kids in Tri-city neighborhood

Upon exiting the gym in downtown Oceanside on Wednesday, the tall, lanky teenager said it’s always been his “official dream” to be a boxer.

The youth had just spent his first day in the boxing program coordinated by Resilience Community Mentoring Program and the Nevarez gym. In fact, it also was only his second day in the Resilience program, referred there by the courts.

Because he is on probation and, at the time of the interview was a minor (he turned 18 Saturday), the youth who lives in the Tricity area could not give his name.

The Tri-city neighborhood is one Jaime Figueroa, program manager for the Resilience project, and Brian Nevarez, gym co-owner, know well. Growing up, they went to elementary school together there.

Then, as now, gangs were active in the area.

But the two childhood friends took a different path. Figueroa obtained a bachelor’s degree from University of California, Berkeley, and Nevarez chose the path laid out years ago by his father, Bernardo — running a boxing program.

It’s a second-generation story.

Some 28 years ago, the Union-tribune ran a story by this reporter about boxing lessons being provided by the senior Nevarez for at-risk youth in the backyard of his Oceanside home.

His son, who still has a clipping of that story, “basically is following in his father’s footsteps,” Sandra Nevarez said.

“We both really wanted to help — anything to get these guys off the streets,” Brian Nevarez said of the lessons he learned from his father’s efforts decades ago and his own today.

Figueroa said in an email that the Resilience program is based on one in New York. He said it’s a “unique and transformative mentoring program that utilizes and employs formerly incarcerated and former gang members from Oceanside to mentor youth and young adults from Oceanside and Vista on juvenile probation. Resilience is funded by the County of San Diego in partnership with the Juvenile Probation Department and facilitated under the Vista Community Clinic.”

“Our mentors are distinguished community leaders who have used their second chance to instill hope and guidance to our mentees by utilizing their lived experiences as well as trauma informed and restorative practices.

“The majority of our mentors were active gang members during the 1990s and 2000s, which were Oceanside’s most violent years involving gangs.”

And that’s when Bernardo Nevarez stepped up with his boxing program.

His son’s Nevarez Boxing Training Gym has been downtown for about six years, Brian’s wife, Sandra, co-owner, said in an interview outside the Coast Highway storefront.

She’s a boxer, too — since her youth.

She said she, too, understands the need to reject some of the old thinking from the streets. “There’s more to life than what neighborhood you’re in,” she said.

Figueroa said about a dozen Resilience youths are involved in the boxing program, with four or five of them going to the gym for a 90-minute training session on any given Wednesday. Van transportation is provided.

“Kids do not necessarily like structure,” Figueroa said, “but they need it” and at a time when they’re out of school, the gym program provides some structure.

An opportunity for boxing lessons provides “a selling point” probation officers use to get the youths into the Resilience program, Figueroa said. It takes up what otherwise might be idle time, he said.

And, Figueroa said, he sees improvement in the youths every week. And some want to keep coming, even after they’ve been released from probation.

(There are girls in the Resilience program, too, but they’re not involved in the boxing)

Sandra Nevarez said that at a cost of $94.99 a month for unlimited classes — no contracts required — the gym is one of the least expensive in town.

It’s his goal, Figueroa said, to get grants so that more youths can participate and to help small businesses, which have been suffering during the pandemic in Oceanside.