LOS ANGELES — Facing peer pressure can be hard, but teens at the Boys and Girls Club in Monterey Park are learning to say no to drugs and alcohol together.
Victoria Perez is one of the high school students who chooses to spend her afternoons at the Brent’s Club chapter offered at the Boys and Girls Club.
“I thought maybe it would just be lessons of drug and alcohol awareness, but it just it’s so much bigger than that,” Perez said.
Perez and the other participants soon realized they were not just gaining knowledge about the dangers of drugs, but were also being rewarded for actively taking those lessons into their daily decision making.
The program takes their commitment to staying drug free serious, and it’s why every week participants are drug tested at random.
So far, director of the Brent’s Club, Angel Silva, says they have not had any test results come back positive.
The deal is that those who remain drug free are rewarded through field trips, activities and also become eligible for a full four-year scholarship or partial renewable scholarships.
“Like our Maui trip that we do every summer, where we go, and we do a service project on the island of Maui,” Silva said.
The approach was designed by the Brent Shapiro Foundation, which was created by Brent’s parents after losing their son to addiction. The hope was to prevent this from happening to any other families and help reduce the risks of falling into substance abuse among youth.
This year, some participants created the TLC or Think, Lead, Create Change mental health project to advocate for continued funding toward drug use prevention, treatment and recovery resources.
Perez was one of the participants and, along with her team, was able to attend the Boys & Girls Clubs of America’s Summit for America’s Youth in Washington, D.C.
This was the first time flying for many of the participants and the first time at D.C. for all the students.
It’s experiences like those that Silva says these students would otherwise not have access to without the program.
Perez says it took a lot of preparing and researching to create the project, but was all worth it when they were able to present it to elected officials and share why this cause means so much to them.
“It was such an amazing opportunity, especially for advocating for not just alcohol and drug abuse, but for mental health and how those things merge together,” Perez said.
The advocacy and awareness the students are helping create comes as a time when fentanyl continues to be the most common cause of accidental drug overdose deaths in Los Angeles County.
“We were learning and teaching at the same time very much, because we thought we knew everything about fentanyl, but it decided to change the whole game,” Silva said.
Although, it can be tough to keep up, he says the ever-changing substance landscape makes their efforts that much more important.
Something Perez’s mother, Monica Vargas, agrees with and why she says the program has given her a peace of mind although the idea was jarring at first.
“It was a little shocking because where I come from, I’m a first generation, so we tend to come sometimes from very close or conservative families. So we think out of sight, out of mind. We don’t talk about it,” Vargas said.
However, she knew it was important for parents to communicate with their children, and this program was the perfect way to do it.
“If those additional incentives help, especially with so much pressure out there for these teens, by all means, I’m all for it. I’m 100% for it,” Vargas said.
Along with the incentives, Silva says the students have also become each other’s support system, which itself is a way to reduce the risk of substance abuse among youth.
“That’s the great part. You know, it’s not just within the clubhouse, they all go to the same school, and they hold each other accountable,” Silva said.