LYNN — The Lynn office of Straight Ahead Ministries, an organization that strives to transform the lives of juvenile offenders and a staple on Munroe Street for 15 years, is closing its doors in April.
Scott Larson, president and founder of Straight Ahead Ministries, based in Worcester, said the Lynn re-entry center, or office, will close April 1.
Right now, he said the organization can’t justify the work done in Lynn, with three staff members sharing such a large space. He said there’s not nearly as many youth offenders transitioning back into Lynn with the Department of Youth Services, a state agency that operates the state’s juvenile justice services, as when the office opened.
Larson said the organization would like to have something it can transition into when it moves out of its Munroe Street office space, so it is looking at having an office in a building at another site in Lynn, possibly a church.
In 2002, when Straight Ahead Ministries started in Lynn, Larson said the number of youths represented in the city with the Department of Youth Services was very high — at one point, he said Lynn was the second- or third-most violent city in the Commonwealth and had the second-largest number of youths represented. But the number of youths serviced in Lynn has gone down.
“While we’ll follow up, it doesn’t justify the kind of space and programming that we had there at one point for the amount of youth that are in the Department of Youth Services from Lynn,” Larson said. “We’ll still work with them, but we don’t need the kind of space we had before.”
Esther Summerset, director of the Lynn branch of Straight Ahead Ministries, said the organization has made a decision to go back to its original roots, which was simply building relationships with inmates one-on-one. She said the organization will be continuing services, as far as going into facilities and prisons, and collaborating with local agencies.
Summerset said the re-entry center in Lynn has consisted of case management, outreach, educational support, job placement, court advocacy and recreation.
She said the organization has been in collaboration with other resources such as North Shore Community College and Lynn Youth Street Outreach Advocacy (LYSOA).
Summerset said there are a lot of gang members in Lynn who ultimately come through the program through the Shannon Initiative, which reorients gang members into society.
In 2016, Summerset said 247 youth were serviced through the office. Although the organization will continue transitioning youth back into the community, she said eliminating the office will take away a resource for youth to go to.
“One of the saddest parts of this is that we’re a drop-in center,” Summerset said. “A lot of our youth are also homeless or struggling — they’re able to come here and just hang out. When I hear (from) a lot of youth, a lot of them say to me: where are they going to go? I think that will definitely be a traumatic change for the youth in the community … They eat, hang out and then are serviced. The relationship will definitely change. There’s no actual place for them to go. There’s definitely going to be that void.”
Larson said the work that’s happened in Lynn over the past decade or so has been admirable from a number of groups working together and that the organization is more focused in other cities now, such as New Bedford and Lawrence where there are high numbers of youths transitioning back into the communities.
The change in Lynn, Larson said, is that there won’t be a site where everything is run out of — it will be more connecting with youth in the community and directing them more into programs in the city for things such as job training. He said the transition will be more about connecting them with other organizations, rather than Straight Ahead Ministries directly running those services.
The organization, which also has offices in New Bedford and Lawrence, is transitioning more toward doing re-entry in more cities.
“What we have really refocused on is staff who are going into (detention) facilities, which is kind of the core of what we do and following those youth back into a number of cities,” Larson said. “We feel we can service more youth throughout the state that way than when you have all direct service programs in just a couple of cities.”
Larson said a lot of the organization’s program focuses on following juveniles as they turn 18, up to 24, which they’re moving away from. He said the focus is in the juvenile facilities — the organization runs programs in the lockup facilities where kids are and then follows them back up in the communities. He said the organization is going back to focusing more on juveniles, rather than that 18 to 24 range.