It’s a scorchingly hot day, but Bijoux Bahati and JFS’ TST-R staff are enthusiastically leading small groups in team building exercises outside at Providence Farm Collective (PFC). Each summer during their break from in-school programming, the team partners with PFC’s Summer Vibe Youth Employment Program to bring their innovative approach to supporting refugee youth who continue to navigate significant life challenges to a fresh environment.
TST-R’s summer programming at Providence Farm Collective is unique in its emphasis on workforce preparedness through community building and skill development. “The summer model prioritizes outreach and engagement in a less clinical, more experiential setting, helping youth build practical skills in culturally responsive ways”, says TST-R Program Manager Bijoux Bahati. During the school year, in contrast, the TST-R model focuses on providing more structured scaffolded wrap-around services including caregiver outreach, social-emotional skills groups, and individual counseling to students. Bijoux notes that, “Both approaches share a commitment to youth empowerment and emotional wellness but differ in intensity, duration, and setting”.
And it’s the unique setting of TST-R’s collaborative summer programming that makes it so special. Providence Farm Collective is a 37-acre nonprofit farm in Orchard Park whose mission is, “cultivating farmer-led and community-rooted agriculture and food systems to actualize the rights of under-resourced peoples”. Their two main programs, the Incubator Farm Program and the Community Farm Program, provide various under-resourced communities with farmland and the ability to engage in traditional agricultural practices while simultaneously doing the vital work of training a new generation of farmers in sustainable, community-oriented farming.
Holding social-emotional skills groups at the farm lends a uniquely relaxed air to conversations, though the students frequently discuss difficult topics. After working on their community or family farm in the morning, Summer Vibe employees report to the pavilion for group meetings with the JFS team. They sit at picnic tables to learn from trained social workers and exchange ideas with each other. Each day, everyone gathers for a hot lunch courtesy of PFC and chef Sharif Abdi. The meals are traditional dishes, incorporating produce from the farm.
“The summer model prioritizes outreach and engagement in a less clinical, more experiential setting, helping youth build practical skills in culturally responsive ways.”
The TST-R model is purpose-built to provide culturally informed care, which makes PFC an ideal site. Both Bijoux and Kristin Heltman-Weiss, Executive Director at PFC, agree vehemently that partnership between the two organizations is essential in creating a strong program of this kind, with the TST-R team providing social emotional care expertise and PFC providing a trusted paid youth employment program where young people can support their community farms, earn money, and receive the support they need. “Bijoux and her team apply this idea that people are complicated, and they have contained within them language, culture, and their own personal experiences. This holistic approach that Bijoux so generously delivers to the kids is really valuable and unique. It’s this idea that our kids deserve to be understood not in some sort of canned programming way but to have somebody from their community who speaks their language, knows the struggle of their parents and their families, and perhaps has their religious background, and can then work with a trained social worker to deliver trauma informed care in the guise of wellness skills, toolbox building, is genius”.
A partnership with PFC, “allows the TST-R initiative to reach vulnerable youth and families through trusted community channels. Many face cultural, linguistic, and systemic barriers to traditional mental health services, so embedding support within trusted spaces like PFC fosters deeper engagement… By collaborating, we gain trust, cultural insight, and the ability to adapt our services to meet real community needs while building lasting regional networks that support sustainability and resilience.”
Together, Jewish Family Services of WNY and Providence Farm Collective have created a space for youth to express their joy and gain social-emotional tools for navigating the complexities of their unique young adulthoods. As the day nears its end, students sit and laugh together, holding posters they made during the day’s sessions.
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