Elevate Youth Services Awarded 2025–26 Vermont Afterschool Youth Center Grant
There’s a growing consensus that young people need more than achievement pathways. They need places where they can be human before they’re successful. Places where connection comes before credentials.
It’s in that spirit that Elevate Youth Services has been awarded a 2025–26 Middle School/High School Youth Center Grant from Vermont Afterschool, totaling $21,500. This funding will support the Basement Teen Center (BTC) in strengthening youth-led programming, reviving its Teen Council, and expanding opportunities for connection, creativity, and community—on young people’s own terms.
The Basement Teen Center is a free, drop-in space for youth ages 12–17, located in downtown Montpelier in the basement of the Kellogg-Hubbard Library. It is substance-free, adult-supervised, and intentionally designed to be something increasingly rare: a place where teens can feel safe, seen, and supported without being measured, evaluated, or optimized.
Youth come to BTC to unwind after school, meet friends, explore creative workshops, or step into leadership. Just as importantly, they come to do none of those things—to sit, to talk, to exist. That’s not a gap in programming. It’s the point.
Why Unstructured Space Matters
At its core, the Basement Teen Center is built around a simple but powerful idea: belonging precedes growth.
The center gives teens a place to connect with each other, with who they really are, and with the community around them. Time at BTC isn’t over-scheduled or goal-driven on purpose. There’s room for hanging out, resting, laughing, trying things, and following curiosity wherever it leads.
In a world where adolescence often feels like constant pressure to perform, BTC offers something different: a space where nothing is required and no one is measuring success. And it’s in that freedom that real growth happens. Teens gain confidence, form genuine relationships, and develop a sense of belonging that lasts — even when things don’t go perfectly.
Youth Voice as Infrastructure
Youth voice at the Basement Teen Center isn’t a slogan; it’s a governing principle.
When the Teen Council is up and running, teens help shape what happens here: programs, norms, decisions, all of it. And when there hasn’t been a formal council, that doesn’t mean teen voice disappears. Staff still ask. They listen in real conversations, quick Google forms, polls, Discord threads, and spur-of-the-moment votes in the space. The tools change, but the message stays the same: what teens think matters, and we take it seriously.
Leadership isn’t about fitting into a predefined role. It grows out of who a teen already is. Staff pay attention to strengths and interests as they show up, then offer opportunities that actually make sense for that individual. Sometimes leadership looks big and visible; sometimes it’s quiet and behind the scenes. Either way, contribution isn’t reserved for the loudest or most confident voices.
A key focus of this grant is bringing the Teen Council back and giving it real support, so teens can help shape both the culture and the day-to-day life of the center. In a very real way, their guidance will influence how funds are used. That could mean hosting an open house or community game night, planning a bowling trip, buying new art supplies or equipment, hosting a concert, or saying yes to a spontaneous idea that comes straight from the teens themselves.
That flexibility is on purpose. Things work better when they respond to the people who are actually in the room. And teens, after all, are the experts on their own lives.
Inclusion, Safety, and the Work of Belonging
The Basement Teen Center operates on a shared agreement: “Respect yourself, others, and the space.” Simple, yes—but foundational.
That same principle shows up in how conflict is handled and how safety is built. Adults and older teens set the tone by using inclusive language, showing respect, and modeling what it looks like to treat people well. Acceptance isn’t something you earn, and belonging isn’t for show. It’s something that’s practiced, daily, in small and very real ways.
Over time, the center has formed strong, lasting partnerships with groups like ORCA Media, Vermont Humanities, and the Cardboard Teck Institute. Those relationships really mattered after the flood, when connection and collaboration weren’t just nice to have — they were essential.
More recently, BTC has found a deeply supportive partner in the Kellogg-Hubbard Library. The space itself, and the history it holds, make it a natural home for the center. For many teens, the library has always been there — a place they grew up visiting — and that sense of familiarity strengthens their connection to BTC and to the community as a whole.
BTC’s eight active volunteers help bring the wider community right into the room. Their presence sends a simple but powerful message: you matter to people you haven’t even met yet. By showing up with genuine interest, care, and kindness, volunteers help teens feel what community support actually looks like, not in theory, but in everyday moments.
Growth Without the Myth of Perfection
Today’s teens are growing up inside systems, especially social media, that reward perfection and punish vulnerability. BTC offers a different story.
Staff and volunteers speak openly about the inevitability, usefulness, and humanity of failure. Adults model what it looks like to engage clumsily, to struggle visibly, and to try without polish. Within a culture of kindness and inclusion, the cost of getting something wrong is lower—and the reward for trying is higher.
That’s how comfort zones expand. Not through pressure, but through safety.
Vermont Afterschool's Youth Center Grant funds the creation and expansion of designated community spaces for Vermont's middle- and high-school-aged youth. The grant program increases access to youth center programming for those youth who are historically marginalized, supporting youth to build community within and outside the program, and using approaches that cultivate and maximize youth leadership, agency, and voice.
By targeting spaces where youth are actively contributing to the design of programming, where they are accepted for their authentic selves, and where they feel supported to comfortably stretch themselves as they learn and grow with the program, the Youth Center Grant not only creates safe community spaces for Vermont's young people, it does so by empowering them.
Vermont Afterschool is excited to have the opportunity to help youth create a brighter future for themselves and their communities.