Trauma surrounds Philly youth. At this school district ‘healing camp,’ kids tackle it head on.

When Rhymeir McKellar walks down the street, he thinks people see a young Black man with tattoos, braids and a backward ball cap and assume, there goes a threat.

But knowing McKellar is to know a teenager bursting with humor who is personable and polite. He’s a musician and athlete who will bend your ear about why he wants to go to college and study business, about how the hard things he’s been through don’t define him.

“I wish people would just get to know me,” said McKellar, 18, a rising senior at George Washington High School. “I’m funny, I’m helpful.”

McKellar and dozens of other Philadelphia School District students leaned into those feelings this week at Camp Akili, an experience organized around “healing-centered engagement,” a practice that aims to address community trauma and build stronger schools and communities.

The work is rooted in the research and practice of Shawn and Nedra Ginwright, who have spent the last 30 years steeped in youth development and social and emotional learning. Shawn Ginwright is a Harvard University education professor who believes that “young people in many cities in this country have so much untreated, unhealed trauma.”

Philadelphia’s school board earlier this year awarded Flourish Agenda, the Ginwrights’ nonprofit, an $885,000 contract to pay for the camp and for training for up to 250 district staff who work in the central office and at 16 schools. State grants are funding the contract, which runs through the 2023-24 school year.

It means that this week, 75 district youth ages 14 through 18 are spending time living on Philadelphia University’s East Falls campus, celebrating themselves and confronting the big issues that surround them: gun violence, depression, racism.

McKellar’s counselor suggested he apply for Camp Akili. McKellar had to leave one Philadelphia high school where he got in fights, and coped with a home life that was sometimes complicated — his family experienced homelessness, living in a car for months.

The idea of a “healing camp” that gets deep into issues of self-worth, racial identity, and community healing was a little daunting, at first. But McKellar found himself loving it.

“A lot of people my age and from my background get discouraged fast, but you’ve got to say, ‘Let me forgive myself, forgive everything that put me in that situation,’” said McKellar. “Being able to talk about what went on, it’s lifting things off my chest. I feel lighter.”

His friend Dana Medley, a student at YES Philly, an alternative program that educates district students and also participates in the healing-centered engagement work, is now a Camp Akili believer, too.

Medley, who has six sisters, “had to step up at a real young age,” he said. “I had to pitch in on bills at 12, 13.” He struggled at a Philadelphia comprehensive high school, but found self-worth and income as a chef. Spending a week on healing was transformational, Medley said.

“We’ll take this back to school,” he said. Staff from George Washington, YES Philly, and the other schools are also being trained on the Healing Centered Engagement principles; officials say the aim is more meaningful adult-student relationships and a calmer school climate.

Jayme Banks, the school district’s deputy chief of prevention and intervention, is all in on the work. As she sought to help students and schools move forward amid the city’s gun violence epidemic and post-pandemic, she learned about healing-centered engagement and wanted to dig deeper.

“It didn’t feel check-boxy, and it can really resonate with our communities, our youth, our families,” said Banks.

That is, the trauma baked into most Philadelphia students’ lives often needs intervention from medical professionals — psychologists, therapists. But it’s got to be bigger than that, Banks said; the needs are too great.

“It’s all of us. All of us have a piece to do to help each other. That’s the only way we’re going to break down all of this,” she said.

Until this week, Camp Akili existed only in California, where the Ginwrights are based. The organization had plans to take the camp national, in a few years, but Banks talked them into bringing it to Philadelphia this year — “a model that no one else has done before,” Banks said.

Energized by the progress she’s seen since beginning to work on healing-centered engagement earlier this year, Banks has big plans for expansion — camps for parents, camps on school breaks. She’s already had discussions with philanthropists and nonprofits about funding the work.

“I want to do this in a very transformative way that we are moving communities,” said Banks. “I’m not even talking about school communities — I want the whole community.”

Sometimes, the work is heavy, such as the time Banks saw a young man stepping away from a session with tears in his eyes. He had just found out that a friend, a victim of gun violence, was hospitalized in critical condition. And sometimes the work is joyful and life-affirming.

On Monday night, McKellar and Medley participated in a pillow fight in the Philadelphia University dorms — the first of their lives. It was planned lightheartedness, the kind of thing that’s too often missing from Philadelphia young people’s lives.

“I felt like a big kid,” McKellar said.

These days, “nobody knows how to hold a conversation, nobody’s held accountable,” Medley said. Activities such as pillow fights and the twice-daily Harambee ceremonies held every day at camp, with chants and affirmations, help build bridges to those things, Medley and McKellar said.

Fresh off a plane from Boston, the Ginwrights watched as 75 Philadelphia students participated in a midday icebreaker Tuesday. A DJ spun tunes as young people moved from group to group, answering the question: “If you could be anywhere right now, where would you be, and with whom?”

The Ginwrights were in their element, smiling, talking to young people and Camp Akili staff. The experience, Shawn Ginwright said, is about looking back at traumas, but also about “moving forward into a more joyous, healthy, loving space.”

A key tenet of Camp Akili is lifting up the Black experience. About half of the district’s students are Black, and encouraging self-love in a world that often dehumanizes youth of color is crucial, said the Ginwrights.

And though the camp, and the training, are not guaranteed to succeed, with time and practice, they have the potential to build stronger schools.

“What I’m hoping is that you give the students and teachers tools to recalibrate a school climate that’s centered on well-being,” said Shawn Ginwright. “All of these little things add up to a shift in climate that’s much more healthy and more positive.”

The schools chosen to receive training are Gideon Elementary, Francis Scott Key Elementary, George Washington High School, High School of the Future, Blaine Elementary, Jay Cooke Elementary, Bartram High School, Kenderton High School, Kensington High School, Liguori Academy-Fortis, Martin Luther King High School, Bethune Elementary, Roxborough High School, Duckrey Elementary, Tilden Middle School, and YES Philly.