Editor's note: Roxbury Youthworks is one of many charitable organizations to which Harvard employees can contribute through the Community Gifts through Harvard campaign.

By Ken Gewertz

Gazette Staff

Peter Hardie '77, executive director of Roxbury Youthworks Inc. (RYI), sees his agency as an oasis where kids who are in trouble or headed for trouble can get the life-giving help and attention they need to turn their lives around.

"We start with kids where they're at, and we don't care where they've been. While they're with us, there's no stigma from yesterday," Hardie said.

Housed in a small puddingstone building on Warren Street near Dudley Station, the agency fills a unique niche. It is the area's only minority provider of supportive services to court-involved and other youths from ages 13 to 19.

Through its Juvenile Court Clinic in the Roxbury District Court, the agency assesses the needs of court-referred adolescents and serves as the primary entry for most RYI clients. In this way, RYI is able to make contact with youths at a crucial moment in their lives and offer them an opportunity to create a new future for themselves.

"The big challenge is how to engage young people who have tuned out," Hardie said. "I always start with the assumption that there's a basis for connection. I think that most people want to be liked, they want to be respected, and they want the truth. Some people look at kids who have gotten into trouble and say, 'Let's lock them all up.' But I believe there's a human being there who wants to come out and wants to connect."

The agency uses a variety of innovative programs to engage the interests of its adolescent clients and to help them develop the skills they will need to function successfully in society.

One of these is "Ready, Train, Hire," a program that helps kids develop fundamental job readiness skills to make the transition from school to work. In addition to creating resumes and getting practice in filling out application forms, the agency's clients gain hands-on work experience by mowing lawns, raking leaves, painting, and doing other yard and maintenance work for local residents.

Another project that is currently in the works is an entrepreneurship program that will help kids develop a business plan, locate start-up capital, set up a storefront, and eventually start their own business.

The agency also offers recreational activities, including a basketball league that meets on Tuesdays and Thursdays and a rowing program that operates in conjunction with the Hull Maritime Museum's Charlestown Navy Yard rowing program.

The program, now in its third year, got a boost recently when U.S. Olympic rower Doug Burden visited the agency to talk with participants, answer questions, and raise money by auctioning off some of his Olympic memorabilia.

In addition to these services, the program also offers counseling and mentoring and works closely with the Department of Youth Services and other human service agencies to deal with problems that kids may have as they work on creating new lives for themselves.

Founded 15 years ago by Julian Huston, now associate justice of the Superior Court of Massachusetts, RYI remains a small agency, but it has had a large impact on the lives of many area youngsters, both through its own programs and through its connections with the court, schools, and other local institutions.

Hardie, who has been executive director for the past three years, was an Afro-American studies concentrator at Harvard who worked for the Union of Electrical Workers after graduation, struggling to get more minorities into the machine trades.

He left union work in the late 1980s and got involved in local politics, serving as president of the Black Political Task Force and managing the campaign of Nelson Merced, a state representative from Dorchester.

Then, at the urging of a member of the Boston School Committee who convinced him that more African-American males were needed as teachers, Hardie became a teacher at Madison Park High School in Roxbury, specializing in kids with behavioral problems. When the position at Roxbury Youthworks opened up, Hardie decided to take what he'd learned as a teacher and apply it in a new context.

"Teaching high school first gave me a love of kids on the margins," he said. "They're great kids, but they don't always act in ways that are friendly to their own life path. I just think it's great when we can prove that the people who have given up on them are wrong."