Visible and Invisible

This year I have the honor of guiding our senior class in carrying out a capstone project. They came into the first day of classroom work with ideas of wanting to help everything and everybody, locally and around the world, in every possible way. They had no idea how beautiful a concept this was, or what a gift their priorities are to our area.

For anyone who has ever had a loss of faith in the upcoming generation or a draining away of hope for the future, I can assure you, there are young people who are ready to serve.

As the students narrowed their ideas down and honed the scope of their project, they came to the conclusion that what they really wanted to do was bring people’s invisible struggles in our community into the light. They want to make the invisible visible for our county. Specifically, they want to do that for our local children and youth.

When struggles are visible, we in Santa Cruz County are a community of problem solvers. If we see it, we work to make it better, because who among us wants to bear anothers’ suffering in our own local community?

I live in a middle class neighborhood, and several years ago our students illuminated a community living less than a mile away from me that faces abject poverty

Hunger, lack of education and healthcare, and a complete lack of resources are problems these humans face every day. Our students worked with the Center for Farmworker Families in a holiday drive for basic supplies and support, and I was stunned to discover that six hundred migrant workers are quite literally my neighbors. My invisible neighbors.

Young people in our county have a special power to bring these issues into our consciousness. I remember, as a high school student, wondering why adults could not see the pressing issues that were right in front of them.

As parents, most of us work to shield our children from the harsher realities of the world, to keep them innocent, or to keep them believing that the world is good and kind, for as long as possible. As students become teenagers and wander out of their parents’ protective bubble, they are novel to the struggles that exist all around them.

Seeing the world through their eyes is a privilege and it is also revealing.

When we “grown-ups” have collected enough experiences of the world at its worst, we develop skills to cope with harsh realities. Sometimes those skills involve, at least partially, shutting things out or denying what is right before our very eyes

Does it hurt to have the veil lifted, to see what is really there? My students inspire me to react with
action, love and hope, rather than despair

We meet two times a week, and the students assign themselves action items, and then we meet again to update each idea or initiative to reach down off the mountain from our comfortable school. A teenager, at the threshold of adulthood, is a gift to a community.

Too often we view them as problems. What do we do to keep the kids busy after school, so they don’t cause trouble? How do we keep the kids out of trouble? My students, on the other hand, are going to keep the adults out of trouble. They are going to remind us of what a community is, and how we can engage with it in the best way possible.

I can’t wait to see what they do, what they see, what they discover, and to share the activities of their project, MMS Off the Mountain as it develops.

Readers can follow MMS Off The Mountain on instagram, at @off_the_mountain_2025