Meet the inaugural Youth Cohort of Piton Fellows, a group of changemakers ages 14-20 who have become part of the Gary Community Ventures team and a powerful network of community members as they learn and progress on their leadership journeys.

The Piton Fellowship is designed to help leaders in business, policy and philanthropy leverage dedicated financial and strategic support from Gary Community Ventures to expand their knowledge, network and potential to drive positive change for themselves and their communities, with an emphasis being placed on developing young leaders of color.

Piton Fellows: Youth Cohort

Get to know our fellows and two impact areas they’re hoping to address.

Fellowship Projects

Fellows were asked to lend their brilliance to a pair of pressing problems in the summer of 2022: youth mental health & youth self sufficiency

The 2022 Youth Cohort diligently worked over the course of 6 weeks, with support from Sienna Chambers, Matti Dimmick and Garfield Warren, our partners from the Urban Leaders Fellowship (ULF), conducting research, executing interviews and preparing presentations on their findings and recommendations as to how our city and state might address two ongoing issues:

1. The ongoing “state of emergency” for youth mental health, as articulated by Children’s Hospital Colorado
2. Increasing self-sufficiency standards among K-12 youth, so that they might become better prepared for the world they will inhabitant when they leave the public education system

The cohort presented their findings to an audience that included Gary Community Ventures employees, community partners and past Piton Fellowship participants. The Youth Cohort’s invaluable reports and findings will continue to inform solutions sought by the Gary team.

Featured PROJECT: EXAMINING YOUTH SELF-SUFFICIENCY

This is a presentation from one of two cohort groups who examined the youth self-sufficiency question. The group offered the following explanation and takeaways from their work:

Approach
In brainstorming self-sufficiency we began to think of what we wished schools taught us, contrasting from what we learned through community and external resources. We focused on skills fundamental to financial stability, pursuing passions, and achieving careers. Based on feedback from politicians, life coaches, business owners, and young adults with a variety of experiences, we found that interviewees from the Denver area are pleased with their education and career experience, but most people learned the most useful language, financial, and emotional skills from external outlets, but wished they would have learned these skills from their K-12 education. From the experts, we learned that robust non-academic and alternative education is imperative to furthering the success of our students.

Conclusion
As Gary Community Ventures moves forward with creating programs to help young adults become self sufficient, we recommend special attention to researching and advocating for changes in school curriculum to include more classes with highly specialized teachers in fields like long-term financial education and emotional health, as well as researching alternative graduation paths for students whose passions don’t follow the traditional college-track.

Learn More About the Piton Fellowship

Although our initiatives now live under the Gary Community Ventures name, we intentionally chose to honor our history as The Piton Foundation in selecting The Piton Fellowship as the title for this program. We did so because we believe this name tells a perfect story about the idea of ascendency in leadership that Piton has long represented.

There are three cohorts of the fellowship for Youth, Early Career Professionals and Mid-Career Professionals. Designed to accessibly fit into the busy lives of fellows, this free experience allows fellows to continue working and learning while building their leadership skills, networks and potential to create community impact. Upon completion of the program, Gary provides fellows a payment to use towards professional development and career-building opportunities.