‘Build the trust’: Philly youth find, create community at Collective Climb

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On a recent chilly afternoon, participants in the Restorative Community Project program at Collective Climb huddled inside a warm space in Center City in Philadelphia.

The session was the first in the months-long cohort, designed especially for high schoolers and teenagers of color, where participants are paid to become restorative justice practitioners.

On this particular day, nine young people sat in a circle discussing redlining, colonization and substance abuse, passing a wooden piece back and forth to the next speaker. They read Joy Harjo’s poem “Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings,” and reflect on how it relates to the kind of community they want to build for their cohort at Collective Climb.

It’s this kind of collaborative learning that sets Collective Climb apart, said co-founder and executive director Mckayla Warwick.

“I feel like one of the reasons we’re able to cultivate that environment is as simple as just using a restorative technology,” Warwick said. “We aren’t sitting at tables, you know? We’re sitting in a circle, and we have a talking piece, so there is no leader in the room. Every single person when they have that talking piece is the person who’s expressing themselves, and the rest of us are actively listening, critically engaged with what they’re saying, and yes, building upon that.”

Warwick, Kwaku Owusu and Hyungtae Kim founded the organization in 2020, when they were seniors at University of Pennsylvania. They received the university’s “President’s Engagement Prize,” a $100,000 grant plus a living stipend for graduating seniors working on a project for social good.

The founders at first planned to provide financial literacy workshops to West Philly teens, but their focus shifted in 2020. While the country was largely on lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic,  protests over George Floyd’s murder at the hands of police and an uptick in gun violence were impacting many young people in the neighborhood.

“There wasn’t really space for teens to openly and candidly process their emotions,” Owusu, the group’s co-founder and finance director, said. “So we shifted and used the framework of restorative justice, which was new in theory to us, but in our lived experiences, was something very grounded.”

From there, Owusu, Warwick and Kim built out Collective Climb to include the RCP program and its Restorative Justice Diversion program, working with teens whose criminal cases are referred to them by the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office.

This year, the nonprofit moved into a permanent space at 15th and Pine streets in Center City.

Warwick and Owusu said having a central meeting place for their diversion and Restorative Community Project (RCP) programs is a huge benefit, especially as Collective Climb has grown to serve teens from neighborhoods throughout the city.

“The goal is to have this as a functional community space where you don’t necessarily have to be a Collective Climb RCP or Diversion youth to pop in,” Owusu said. “You could just be a kid walking down the street, down 15th and need a place to chill, need some food, need some water, or just need to be young.”

‘Channel that energy’

Rumi Sheikh, 17, said he struggled with discipline and wasn’t in the best mental space before joining Collective Climb’s RCP program as a high school sophomore in 2022.

“I did always have a passion to change something or fix something, but I never really acted on that passion,” he said. “But Collective Climb is a perfect place for you to act on your passions related to helping change the environment around you … It made me want to go out and actually do things for people that were in my capacity, like I was able to utilize my capabilities and actually put them to work somewhere.”

Through his experience at Collective Climb, he thought about how he could contribute to his local community in North Philly and beyond. After completing the RCP program, Sheikh continued to stay involved, working as a youth co-facilitator with the diversion program.

He sees himself working on improving public health policies.

“Now I know different ways that I can help out a marginalized group in Philadelphia, in my city,” he said. “And I know how I can channel that energy and channel my passion for medicine and overall, just like politics and policy in a different way, something that I would have not been able to do before.”

Sheikh is one of the 72 young people who have participated in Collective Climb’s Restorative Community Project program. In Collective Climb’s diversion program, there have been 69 participants. The organization also has a Youth Advisory Board, which enables former RCP participants to continue organizing events, and a Collective Kickbacks series, which allows youth to host community events.

Owusu said the number of participants is just one small part of showing the scale of impact that they’ve had. Each of those participants in the RCP and diversion programs, he said, are people that Owusu and Warwick have been able to invest in fully, in a holistic way.

“We love working with the broader community and doing events and doing outreach,” Owusu said. “But we find that this small-scale community building interpersonal, like one-on-one or one-on-small group, really helps to build the trust that we have with our youth and the sort of relationships that we have that carry the organization forward, because we have a lot of time to invest in whether they want to do something else outside of our programming.”

Sometimes, Warwick noted, they have to reach out to a number of different organizations and other services to make sure that a participant is connecting with the resources they need.

“Especially in the diversion program, when a young person gets arrested, sometimes the arrest is actually the littlest thing, the littlest crisis that they’re actually dealing with,” Warwick said. “And so we often have to do a lot of rapid response funding for families, because we may be dealing with a housing crisis.”

The leaders said they partly measure Collective Climb’s success based on the “lower rate of recidivism” among youth participating in the diversion program. Other impacts of RCP and the diversion programs are less tangible but equally powerful, they said.

“When the program ends, the biggest question is, ‘How can I continue to stay and be a part of this space?’” Warwick said. “But even more so than that, ‘How can I add and build to this space?’”

‘We are all we have’

Warwick and Owusu said their work is all the more significant now with President Donald Trump  eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion programs and personnel.

Owusu said at a recent RCP session, the group “explicitly named how safe this place feels for them.”

“They said that …this is an environment that they look forward to coming to, that they want to be a part of, and that they maybe can only reveal certain facets of who they are when they are here, they can only build relationships with their peers in this particular space because of how it was grounded,” he said.

Owusu would like to see more spaces like Collective Climb replicated across the city.

“I almost feel like we need, I said this in our team meeting the other day, like a modern Underground Railroad of just different spaces that are shared in that belief, in that value, that community is the most important thing, and we are all we have,” he said.

Youth interested in participating in Collective Climb’s programs can follow the organization on Instagram. Anyone interested in supporting the organization’s work can contact Owusu and Warwick online.

Sheikh, for his part, recommends other youth check out the program.

“I would definitely recommend it for one of the biggest reasons is you are allowed, like you’re able to explore yourself in so many ways,” he said. “And the ways you explore yourself, you are helping other people.”

Editor’s Note: This story was updated to reflect the correct year Collective Climb was founded.