DELMAR-Through snowboarding that teaches life skills and art classes that promote financial literacy, SHRED and Young Futures are foundations determined to do their part in making a difference in the lives of children and their futures.
SHRED uses snowboarding to help youth understand life skills and provide career opportunities. As the students evolve into more intermediate snowboarders, they start to ingratiate themselves with the activity and the snowboarding culture, and the career mentoring begins. This becomes a pathway for future careers and future connections within the industry.
“Our mentoring is really multi-layered,” founder Danny Hairston described. “It’s on the grassroots level; it’s on the ground, but there are individuals that are held in high esteem in the snowboarding industry that these youth have access to and can pitch ideas to.”
SHRED encourages an exploration into the arts, which includes graphic design, photography, videography, creative writing, and more, through their mentorship and apprenticeship programs. Career opportunities are taught that include journalism, public relations, marketing, retail, engineering, and resort management.
“The barrier is extremely high,” said Hairston. “A lot of the youth in the communities that we serve, primarily BIPOC youth and underserved youth, don’t have access to the activity.”
He added, “It’s important to us to get youths into the outdoors, provide them with access to this activity, but also the resilience that it builds when you’re learning how to snowboard.”
Snowboarding is also an expensive sport, which is why SHRED is committed to providing everything free of charge to their students, giving them the boots, gloves, hats, jackets, and pants that they need to begin their journey as snowboarders.
Guided by the mantra Fear, Fail, Flow, a vital part of SHRED’s educational process is helping the snowboarding students overcome one of their biggest obstacles of all: the fear of failure.
“A lot of our youths have a fear of failure,” said Hairston. “A lot of that is ingrained; when you walk into school buildings and you talk to motivational educators, they say that failure is not an option. We fail to teach that failure is part of the learning process.”
A key element of SHRED’s educational process is teaching that failure and perseverance are part of learning. These are the life skills that SHRED and Hairston hope that the youth they serve will carry with them both on and off the snow.
“The underlying goal is to increase representation and diversity in the snow space, snowboarding, and outdoor space,” explained Hairston. “It’s an industry that is homogenized for the most part; it’s mostly white and male dominated. A lot of our youth don’t see themselves represented in the industry. It’s starting to change now. We’re really trying to change that.”
“Now that these conversations are being had, children have outlets and more information to better prepare themselves for the future,” mused James Mitchell, founder of Young Futures. The foundation’s name, Young Futures, was an intentional choice by him to reflect the mission.
Young Futures is an art program with a focus on financial literacy. Mitchell describes art as the pathway to teaching children economic concepts such as budgeting and credit.
Young Futures began with their Art and Sole project, a family activity that encouraged families to work together, promoting healthy dynamics by allowing children to be at the forefront of the activity by painting and designing sneakers.
Mitchell’s idea to parlay teaching finance into his preexisting art classes began when Mitchell discovered a large number of children asking thought-provoking questions about finances in relation to the projects they were making in his class.
He recalled a particularly impressionable moment during his art class while teaching his students to make soap. The students expressed curiosity about whether they could make their own soap at home and sell it, showing Mitchell their budding interest in business skills.
“It was from that seed that the children planted that I assessed how we could teach these lessons,” Mitchell reflected. “We created a curriculum that was focused on the basics: the importance of budgeting and banking. We’re defining terms like assets and liabilities.”
He continued, “We’re helping children understand what credit is and why it is important. We’re helping children understand what interest is, how that contributes to developing credit, and why you have to pay it.”
In one class, Mitchell gave them a canvas that had a design with their names on it and a limited amount of paint to work with, encouraging them to paint with the means that they were provided with.
The goal of the class was to help the students understand what they had and how to use it wisely. The connection Mitchell and Young Futures are aiming to make with the concepts is that when the child sees that canvas years later, they will recall the budgeting concept and connect it to the art piece of their childhood.
“Though we serve many demographics, we’re primarily in the inner cities of Albany, Troy, and Schenectady,” said Mitchell. “What we’re doing is letting them know that there are men and women in their community that look like them, that have experienced things that they have experienced, and that are doing things that they may not see as feasible for them to do.”
The missions for both SHRED and Young Futures share a compound effect. By promoting everyday decision-making and life skills against the backdrop of snowboarding and art, the goal is to guide them in ways “that will impact them in a better way,” said Mitchell.
“It may not be the largest decision, but as long as they’re making wise choices day to day, eventually the results will show in a massive way,” he added.
“On our end, it’s really about creating that equity in the outdoor space, equity in snowboarding, but also creating that equity in changing that paradigm in the industry itself,” commented Danny Hairston.
For information regarding registration for Young Futures classes beginning February 16, their upcoming exhibitions, or how to take part in their Art and Sole fundraiser, visit @youngfuturesinc on Instagram and Facebook. For information about SHRED’s opportunities with volunteering, donations, and more, visit https://www.shredfoundation.org.
