“The mission of the center has always been the same and that’s to connect with the youth.”
Written by: Tyisha Blade & Nema Saleem-Green
Located inside Prospect Elementary School, you can find The East Cleveland Neighborhood Center (ECNC). ECNC promotes emotional wellness and decreases non-academic barriers that impact youth. ECNC provides youth with services that include education enrichment, emotional wellness, and community support. ECNC’s main programming efforts center around prevention and social emotional learning (SEL) services being facilitated to schools in the East Cleveland School District as well as at Euclid Middle and Euclid High schools. After school programming is where ECNC continues its mission but in a fun and creative way by adding in art, music, games, and other fun activities. According to the ECNC website, the organization aims to help children grow up to economic opportunity and possess skills to advocate for themselves and those in need.
Nema Saleem-Green is the Program Manager at ECNC. She is also a licensed professional clinical counselor supervisor (LPCC-S) and a board certified register art therapist (ATR-BC) working to support the youth of the East Cleveland and surrounding community. She has been working at ECNC since 2021 and helps to plan, implement, supervise and evaluate assigned ECNC programs and services. She provides advocacy for the organization and its services to the schools and other community partners. Salem-Green also works to establish effective relationships with community groups through attending designated community meetings.
She works with a small team of individuals who work with the schools and community agencies to supply scholars (as she identified that the ECNC team refers to their youth as) with personal strengths and skills to improve their quality of life. “We provide lessons around communication, coping skills, and emotional regulation,” she said. Nema mentioned utilizing “evidence-based curricula appropriate for that age group” of the scholars that they serve at the various schools. Saleem-Green and her team enjoy immersing themselves in the schools to meet scholars where they are at in an effort to accomplish goals: learning communication, coping, emotion regulation, and ATOD refusal skills. “I love going into the schools,” she said. “If I am just sitting behind a desk all day, that’s not going to give me the essence of being able to meet the people I need to.” ECNC’s You Matter Academy Program is a prevention program that provides SEL services to develop emotional wellness and academic enrichment; this is implemented in-school and out-of-school to support the needs of the scholars that ECNC serves. The SEL curricula used by ECNC ranges from Second Step, Girl’s Circle, Growing Into Manhood, and School Connect. The sessions are structured to create healthy attitudes and alter at-risk behaviors by promoting resiliency.
ECNC recently implemented the Positive Actions for Student Success (P.A.S.S.) Program which is a new program that is an alternative to out-of-school suspension. The program includes scholars at Kirk Middle School and Shaw High School and addresses disruptive behavior. It also helps the referred scholars enhance their communication, self-management and self-awareness skills. “The scholars come to our program to talk about what happened (reason for referral), get caught up on schoolwork, and engage in social-emotional learning,” Saleem-Green said. The duration of each scholar’s P.A.S.S Program referral depends on the reason for referral and progress, and varies between 3-10 days.
Another year-round program is ECNC’s Community Youth Diversion Program that works with the Cuyahoga County Juvenile Court. This voluntary prevention program for young first-time offenders of misdemeanors or status offenses is designed to divert scholars away from further juvenile court involvement. A summer program that ECNC runs is partnered with the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF) Freedom Schools, which was rooted in the American Civil Rights Movement. The summer program serves scholars K-12, and enhances their motivation to read and makes them feel good about learning. It is a 6-week program that also focuses on self-esteem, cultural identity, and connecting families to local resources. “It’s about the love of reading and having culturally connected books,” she said. The program has Integrated Reading Curriculum in the morning that fosters literacy with scholars reading books with multiple racial identities and cultures. In the afternoon, scholars engage in structured extracurricular enrichment activities, such as: sports, recreation, arts, hands-on activities connected to fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, and field trips.
ECNC recently completed a Winter Camp where scholars learned about unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, collective economics, purpose, creativity and faith. Scholars engaged in activities that were enriching and that utilized SEL curricula. At the camp’s conclusion, ECNC took the scholars on a field trip to Urban Air Adventure & Trampoline Park in Westlake. “ It was a fun opportunity to celebrate doing something positive for the scholars’ participation and efforts,” Salem-Green said. ECNC also provided lunch for scholars who attended the camp.
Saleem-Green says she decided to work with ECNC because she loves to help underserved populations. She worked in community mental health for seven years before working with ECNC. She says the work is challenging, but she loves it when she sees results. She also says she engages in creating art and leading cardio drumming exercise classes to manage her own self-care on challenging days. In working with ECNC, “it was a great opportunity to grow into a community that has a lot of great qualities,” she said. “The enrichment we get from serving them (scholars) is awesome.” She also says that she enjoys the 1-on-1 connection with the scholars and watching them achieve personal growth. She likes group work as well because she appreciates having scholars work on new experiences, expand their horizons, and watch their minds work together. “I also love giving (scholars) opportunities for self-expression,” she added. She says ECNC is here to connect and be a support to the scholars, the schools and the families that they serve.
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