AHHAH is pivoting from what was previously designated as the "Youth Filmmaking Program" to the newly conceptualized Community Peacekeeper Program.
Programmatic shift: From Trauma-Centered to Healing-Centered
- Mindset and Paradigm Shift: While the program remains deeply trauma responsive, the pedagogical approach is shifting from a trauma-centered framework (focusing on past offenses and lived trauma) to a healing-centered framework. This model prioritizes positive youth development by focusing on the young person’s innate strengths, self-knowledge, and personal agency.
- A Shift in Community Perception: By changing the project name to the Community Peacekeeper Program, the initiative aims to fundamentally disrupt how the community views these participants. Instead of viewing them as "troublemakers" or juvenile offenders trapped in the system, the program highlights them as local peacekeepers, leaders, and collaborative problem-solvers.
- Core Strategic Pillars: The overarching project interweaves three programmatic populations to break the cradle-to-prison pipeline in Coatesville:
- Youth on probation (the core Media/Peacekeeper cohorts).
- The SUSO girls' after-school community service program (9th–12th grade).
- Incarcerated youth at the Chester County Youth Center (CCYC).
Structural Reorganization: The Three 10-Week Cohorts
Previously, the program operated as a single, continuous 30-week cohort for a small group of youth. To comply with the structural requirements and protocols dictated by the Chester County Probation Center, the program is transitioning into three sequential 10-week cohorts over the grant year.
- The Probation Protocol Alignment: New youth placed on probation typically face a mandatory 10-week community service requirement. This program serves in lieu of standard punitive service (such as picking up trash), providing meaningful, skill based restorative alternatives.
- The Multi-Tiered Progression Model: Each 10-week cohort will induct 6 to 8 new youth referred via probation. However, to encourage and preserve deep technical learning and nurture facilitative leadership, that requires longer exposure, any youth who completes their initial 10 weeks and wishes to stay can continue into the next cycle.
- Evolving Leadership Roles: Returning students from earlier cohorts will not simply repeat basic tasks. They will graduate into advanced peer leadership roles, actively helping facilitators construct a safe space, co-facilitating restorative check-in circles, leading lively team-building icebreakers, and mentoring incoming participants.
Baseline Promise: Core Deliverables for Every Participant
Whether a student participates in the standard 10-week cycle or extends their involvement for full duration, the program guarantees a core "floor" of deliverables and skill acquisitions:
1. Upstander and Restorative Justice Training
Participants receive targeted training focused on non-violent conflict resolution and de escalation skills. Youth Justice Advisory Board members and adults undergo a comprehensive 6-hour training program, while the core youth cohorts receive 4 hours of training (comprising 2 hours of baseline introduction and 2 hours of hands-on, practical implementation).
2. Technical Media Skills & Digital Storytelling
Youth learn the foundational concepts of photography, digital media marketing, and audio production/podcasting. Utilizing these digital mediums acts as a vehicle for authentic storytelling, breaking down community walls, building cultural bridges, and introducing youth to viable career pathways in the creative arts (e.g., webmasters, digital creators).
3. Facilitation of Community Restorative Circles
Participants are trained to convene and actively lead diverse, inclusive community circles. This transferable skill empowers them to bring school administrators, city officials, and peers into open dialogues, highlighting broken systems while collaboratively building local safety nets.
4. Integrated Peer and Intergenerational Mentorship
Every youth is enveloped in a deliberate basket of support, pairing them with older collegiate peer mentors (ages 20–26), returning student assistants from previous Restorative Justice Filmmaking program, and invested local adults who act as consistent champions for their personal resiliency.
1. Upstander and Restorative Justice Training
Participants receive targeted training focused on non-violent conflict resolution and de escalation skills. Youth Justice Advisory Board members and adults undergo a comprehensive 6-hour training program, while the core youth cohorts receive 4 hours of training (comprising 2 hours of baseline introduction and 2 hours of hands-on, practical implementation).
2. Technical Media Skills & Digital Storytelling
Youth learn the foundational concepts of photography, digital media marketing, and audio production/podcasting. Utilizing these digital mediums acts as a vehicle for authentic storytelling, breaking down community walls, building cultural bridges, and introducing youth to viable career pathways in the creative arts (e.g., webmasters, digital creators).
3. Facilitation of Community Restorative Circles
Participants are trained to convene and actively lead diverse, inclusive community circles. This transferable skill empowers them to bring school administrators, city officials, and peers into open dialogues, highlighting broken systems while collaboratively building local safety nets.
4. Integrated Peer and Intergenerational Mentorship
Every youth is enveloped in a deliberate basket of support, pairing them with older collegiate peer mentors (ages 20–26), returning student assistants from previous Restorative Justice Filmmaking program, and invested local adults who act as consistent champions for their personal resiliency.
The "P.I.L.O.T." Operational Framework
The curriculum anchors itself onto the PILOT acronym, which underscores the program's mission to provide system-impacted youth with the navigational tools, technical skills, and leadership capabilities required to successfully pilot their own lives, choose positive pathways, and guide their local communities toward restorative healing, and which ensures all foundational elements of positive youth development are being met:
- P – Positive, Respectful, and Supportive Relationships: Cultivating crucial intergenerational networks between youth, collegiate mentors, and local adults.
- I – Improve Skills: Providing structured opportunities to master technical, intellectual, emotional, and social skills that prepare youth for higher education, employment and success in life.
- L – Linkages Across Systems: Recognizing and actively strengthening the vital connective tissues linking the youth to their schools, families, workplaces, and surrounding community networks.
- O – Opportunities to Contribute and Belong: Offering meaningful spaces for total inclusion, motivating youth to give back through community-advocacy projects.
- T – Trustworthy and Safe Settings: Guaranteeing an environment that secures absolute physical and emotional safety for every participant.