TEHAMA COUNTY, Calif. — Empower Tehama is a non-profit that serves across demographics in Tehama County and their work with the community’s youth has been key in helping violence among them drop.
After violence broke out in Red Bluff among some of its younger residents last month, the Northstate’s News spoke with schools and police about how they’re handling troubled youth across the community. Both groups say Empower Tehama has been a vital player not just with the kids in school but in their homes.
“Stop the generational cycle of violence from happening,” says Jennifer Moniz. “To really get in there early and make changes before we have people coming in as victims or abusers, and that really makes a difference, and that ripples out to the communities so it’s not just the high schools.“
Moniz is the Outreach Manager for Empower Tehama. She shares currently their youth team works regularly at Red Bluff High School, Salisbury High School and the juvenile hall. Along with other schools across the county, they’re called to.
At these schools what they do varies. The goal however is always the same, helping the student process their lives better. Whether that lesson is through the more general lessons they do for classes or more personal diversionary work.
“You’re talking about gangs, but to reach that it involves so many layers, that you can’t just approach that in one direction,” Moniz explains. “It takes a full spectrum of services and help and early interventions to change that.“
Jeremy Hutton, a licensed therapist who works with in-crisis youth, says they’ve seen a massive improvement over the last nine years. Something that shows itself through students getting more engagement with their programs.
“The uptick in the youth participating in, the growth of these programs,” Hutton says. “I think really speaks to the impact of people engaging when they know the services are there.”
Hutton says they want to continue this work in more schools across the county, explaining that as more students at-risk get engaged the more Empower Tehama can do to get them on to a better path.
“The child only knows that so when they come in to program whether in group or they come into individual so when they come into program when they’re, or they come into individual, they’re getting a different sense of reality,” he explains. “They’re getting a non-judgmental place, and so we’re able to help reframe that cognitive functioning to a degree that ‘hey there’s another world out there.”
