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The Empowerment Center’s Rites of Passage program works with approximately 75 adolescent clients each year to help them define their developing role as contributing adults in their communities. Using culturally relevant instruction and tools, we assist them in successfully transitioning from adolescence to adulthood.
The Empowerment Center addresses destructive ideologies and promotes the positive self-conceptions necessary for adolescents to transition into productive adult roles. As we strengthen core cultural values, collective and personal worth and responsibility, and promote positive life choices, we also provide intensive HIV/STD and substance abuse prevention education. Our Rites process is a structured and formalized process through which youth develop a culturally based focus and a strengthened self-identity that prepares them for coping with the many challenges they face daily.
Teaching youth about the accomplishments of others of their heritage and culture provides them an opportunity to see themselves as belonging to a people who have demonstrated worth and contributed to the welfare of humankind. This contributes to a more balanced assessment of their responsibility, role, and position in community.
The Empowerment Center offers a process that facilitates and supports a youth through the transition into adulthood with a positive self-image and a clear view of his or her role in their community and society at large. By providing developmentally challenging, culturally relevant experiences, the Empowerment Project promotes development of a healthy and positive identity grounded in a solid foundation of ethnic pride, self-reliance, and social responsibility.
- To develop in youth the skills necessary to refrain from problematic and illegal behaviors.
- To increase knowledge of ethnically relevant culture and traditions regarding family roles, and community responsibility.
- To provide youth with comprehensive and integrated HIV/STD and substance abuse prevention services using a Rites of Passage model.
- To develop goal assessment and goal setting skills.
- To elevate consciousness in youth about the effects of racism, discrimination, sexism, abuse, and violence to facilitate healing.
- To help youth examine and understand their own individual spirituality and purpose in the world.
- To assist youth in developing and enhancing communication, negotiation, conflict resolution, and violence reduction skills.
The Empowerment Center currently serves all male and female clients aged 12 to 18. Additionally, we recruit youth from community schools and youth groups in Washington, DC and Maryland.
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