Colorado group helps young people turn their lives around and away from the criminal justice system

Inside the halls of Aurora West Preparatory School, mentors like Victoria Smith from a Colorado nonprofit called Fully Liberated Youth work one-on-one with students to turn their lives around and away from the criminal justice system.

"We're wanting to change the narrative," said Smith.

Smith is a community and school-based mentor who visits with students in Aurora as well as others across the Denver metro area throughout the year.

"I meet with them for like 15-30 minutes, sometimes the whole class, depending on what we're talking about," said 8th grader Kola Rios.

William Davis, FLY's director of the Community Based Intervention Services, says the relationships between students and their mentors are invaluable.

"It was always about 'How do we come alongside and build relationships to create access to the things that our youth specifically were not getting what they needed,'" said Davis.

FLY helps young Colorado kids who have been through the jail system or are at risk of entering the system.

"Just over the last fiscal year we were supporting over 250 students over the Denver metro area," said Davis. "As a staff we are sitting somewhere between 23 and 26 members of our team."

FLY has two components. One is CBIS, which is where FLY works with Denver Human Services and the jail system to identify at-risk youth who may need additional services or help with re-entry following their juvenile cases.

"We provide mentorship, peer support. We also do family and individual therapy. We also provide case management and wraparound services as well as re-entry servicing," said Davis.

The other component is School-Based Prevention Services. Schools work with FLY's mentors, like Smith, to identify students who may be at risk of slipping through the cracks.

"Whether that's their attendance is lacking, or they might be getting suspended a lot or they might be having a lot of behavior incidents at school," said Aaron Howard, who is the director of school-based prevention services. "Maybe they're showing signs of being at risk of being pulled into some kind of gang involvement or something like that, and we provide those students with a one-on-one mentor or therapist, who can really build that relationship with them, find out what's going on at home, in the community here at school."

It is a program that relies primarily on grant funding and donations to help make these resources available to families and students like Rios, at no cost.

"I feel it helped me a lot because sometimes I don't really have anyone to talk to about how I feel about certain classes, or certain teachers and everything like that," said Rios.

"That's huge because everyone needs that. Even us as adults need that," said Smith.

This Colorado Gives Day, advocates with FLY hope the community can recognize and support their mission to help young kids thrive, no matter what they've been through.

"I think it's important because sometimes there might be troubled kids and they may not know how to cope with their feelings," said Rios.

Whether it's just having the means to talk to someone else, or to help find the resources to start fresh, organizers say funding these opportunities will help more children "fly" in a better path.

"All humans are meant to be given the opportunity to feel sacred," said Davis.

Learn more about FLY at fullyliberatedyouth.org.