LEAP Kids Talk & Bake

The organization taught her about trauma, brought financial stability to her family, and saved her life. It also bakes a wickedly good plate of chocolate chip cookies.

Those facts about LEAP, the kid leadership, mentoring, and advocacy organization and one of its senior counselors, Leiyanie Osorio, emerged at a short but sweet meeting of the Youth Services Committee of the Board of Alders.

Leiyanie, who likes to be called Lee, was one of the featured young speakers Wednesday night as the committee for the first time this year convened not at City Hall but at a genuine youth space, the headquarters building of LEAP on Jefferson Street.

“We just thought it would be good to be in their space,” said the committee’s chair, Yale Alder Sarah Eidelson. It was also the last committee meeting for the year with just a small amount of housekeeping business to take care of.

As she called the meeting to order inside LEAP’s brightly lit gymnasium, Eidelson looked out on a sea of orange-shirted LEAP counselors and counselors-to-be, often called L.I.T.‘s, or leaders in training.

Leiyanie rose and read remarks of appreciation for what LEAP has done for her after she was recruited to be a counselor in her freshman year at Albertus Magnus College. Now a senior looking forward to a career in criminal justice, Leiyanie said that she went camping for the first time in her life with LEAP. That experience and others helped her understand herself and improve communication skills, which were on display at the gymnasium.

In a conversation before her speech, she spoke of the constant moves and tough neighborhoods she and her single mom had cycled through until they found a stable home. Her salary at LEAP was also of enormous importance to the family budget.

So have been what she described as YD, or youth development sessions, when senior staff or consultants talk to the counselors and, in one particularly memorable session for Leiyanie, focused on trauma: what it is and how to spot it in your charges.

“It helped me understand that I had been through a lot myself,” she said. She also learned how to be on alert for it when the 7 and 8‑year-old girls she works with at the LEAP site at the Clinton School in Fair Haven act out. She said the learning has helped her help herself and the kids, with the result that moods can be changed, for the better.

Leiyanie’s friend Quiara Outing, a senior at Co-Op High and a junior counselor, was the other featured speaker Wednesday night. Unlike Leiyanie, Quiara, who joined LEAP as a participant at age 11, described herself as a ​“LEAPER for life.” ​“I can’t imagine New Haven without it,” she said

Leiyanie called the skills and one-on-one mentoring at the heart of the LEAP model life-changing: ​“It shows kids there is a way out. Not just through education, but mentoring, to hold their hand and to say ​‘This way out.’”

If the Youth Services Committee could grant one Christmas wish for kids in the city, Quiara said, she’d wish for more LEAP sites throughout town.

Leiyanie got down to details: ​“We need more materials to work with the kids. We don’t have enough construction paper, clay, markers, play dough, everything!”

After hearing the young speaker’ remarks and receiving a short tour of the building, the alders reviewed the year and gave themselves a gentle pat on the back for accomplishing their original to-do list.

Those include a online Youth Map; $500,000 violence in prevention grants, of which LEAP received about $60,000; and the plans for a new Q House.

Eidelson advised her members to ponder their success but also to ruminate during the holiday break on what goals to set for 2015.

That process will begin at the next meeting, set for Jan. 7 at 6:30 p.m. Still to be determined is whether the first meeting of the new year will be at City Hall or at another young people’s site.

If the latter, Eidelson said, eyeing the fast-disappearing plate of treats in front of her, ​“We will not require cookies.”