COMMERCE CITY —There’s a little house in a residential neighborhood in south Commerce City where kids and teenagers who have fallen outside the traditional school system can go to work toward their high school degrees — and their characters.
Lisa Benjamin started Bridges of Silence 11 years ago at 5770 Niagara St. to ensure that at-risk children and teens in the north metro area were finishing their education and learning to be good community members.
“Our goal is not only to help them graduate, but also to find out what the next step will be,” Benjamin said. “We work with kids in academics, leadership and entrepreneurism because (to me) those are the essentials in successful personal development.”
Bridges of Silence is Benjamin’s nonprofit. Her original dream was to create a space where kids from her local church could be safe, learn at their own pace, understand proper nutrition and have constant messages about helpfulness and community embedded into them.
“I’m extremely passionate about our young people,” Benjamin said. “What we do with them today is going to impact our future. I want them ready, I want them trained, and I want them caring and loving and kind and aware that people need their help.”
So she bought the 3,000-square-foot house on Niagara Street in 2001 and started with an afterschool tutoring program, a daycare, a summer reading camp and a small community food pantry where the kids and teens worked to fulfill their community service duties, as Benjamin calls them.
Along the way, Benjamin collected community partners that amplified her resources and her mission.
She started working with Food Bank of the Rockies in 2003 to bolster the pantry, called Hands of Hope Food Bank, which now serves individual clients all over Commerce City.
In 2005, with the mission to partner with community-based nonprofits to offer online and blended educations to at-risk youth. HOPE created a learning center inside the Bridges of Silence house. Now, kids could work toward their high school diplomas.
“It’s been an excellent partnership,” said Heather O’Mara, CEO of HOPE Online Leaning Academy. “Our partner contracts last for a year … and we’ve renewed with Bridges for nearly 10 years.”
HOPE provided upwards of 20 computers, and Benjamin converted the bedrooms in the small house into three computer labs. Benjamin’s students — typically about 20 per year — attend classes and complete services projects all year, Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 3:45 p.m.
And, also in 2005, Denver Urban Gardens helped turn the backyard of Bridges of Silence into a full-scale community garden, called , which eventually became a hyper-local farmer’s market.
Le’andra Augustin, 14, has attended Bridges of Silence since the 6th grade. She’s now entering her freshmen year of high school and was recently made manager of the community garden project.
“I like teaching other kids about the garden and how to grow their food,” Augustin said. “I feel like I belong there.”
Augustin said that before she left the traditional school system in Denver, she had a second-grade reading level (in the sixth grade).
“I like being online now. You can do it at home, work at your own pace and set your own schedule,” she said. “When I first started here, I wanted to learn so much that I would stay inside during recess and read. And now I’m happy because I’m doing ninth-grade work. I’ve moved up and I’m doing things that interest me.”
Megan Mitchell: 303-954-2650, mmitchell@denverpost.com or twitter.com/Mmitchelldp
