Twomey Center for Peace through Justice Urban Partners & Youth Leadership Development
Connecting Loyola University to the New Orleans community
21st Century Youth Leadership Participant presenting a bill before the floor of the Alabama State House
Urban Partners
Urban Partners is based on the concept of partnerships and collaborations with organizations working on social justice issues. It seeks to link university resources, faculty, staff and students to assist as a resource to these community organizations and leaders. This has included service on boards, volunteer service, research and analysis, mentoring and consulting, training and facilitation, speaking out, organizing and demonstrating.
In the last 20 years there have been numerous partnerships established through the Twomey Center linking the resources of the university to the community. Here are just a few current and historical examples of what we mean by Urban Partners.
A 20-year history of training, mentoring and partnering in building a youth leadership training institution with 21st Century Youth Leadership Movement based in Selma, Alabama.
Partnering with DJ and Ursula Markey in creating Pyramid Parent Training, a training and advocacy organization of parents of children with disabilities, we created a curriculum for Pyramid and for Families Helping Families that included leadership development, team building, organizing and advocacy, conflict resolution, mediation and negotiation skills-training for the parents to become effective advocates on school leadership teams. Pyramid's founders, D.J. and Ursula Markey were awarded the prestigious Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Award in recognition of their accomplishments.
A historical example of an Urban Partners project was the Jackson Barracks Prison Education Project. For several years, forty Loyola faculty members and staff worked with prison authorities and inmate leaders creating a program that included establishing a prison library and conducting classes in the prison on subjects ranging from literacy to law. The partnership lasted until the prison was closed down.
Youth leadership development partnerships
Our strength in youth leadership development and conflict resolution training and our relationships with youth-serving organizations was matched with the recovery efforts to reestablish youth programs and summer camps for children in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. Ted Quant is one of the founding board members of Operation Reach, an organization created by Dr. Kyshun Webster, himself a 21st Century Youth Leadership Movement alumnae, who organized and sponsored summer programs for children in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast region.
Quant trained the college student volunteers and AmeriCorps workers who staffed those programs. Other youth-servicing organizations served by the Twomey Center include: Kids Rethinking Schools; 21st Century Youth Leadership Movement; Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana; Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children; the Youth Empowerment Project, and Tamborine and Fan. Additionally, Dr. Al Alcazar created a Math and Science Academic Summer Camp for high school students on Loyola’s Campus.
