New Framework Targets Culture, Not Kids, in Pasadena Youth Workshop

A community workshop next month will challenge Pasadena educators, parents, and youth-serving leaders to rethink a basic assumption: that troubled young people are the problem. The problem, according to this presenter, is actually the culture around them.

K-Rahn Vallatine, an author and curriculum developer who has spent years working with incarcerated youth in Los Angeles, will present a workshop titled “When Culture Breaks, Youth Pay the Price” at the Alkebulan Cultural Center on Saturday, April 11, at 1:00 p.m.

The event, co-presented by Live Above the Hype and the Alkebulan Cultural Center, introduces what Vallatine calls the L.I.G.H.T. Model — described in event materials as an identity-driven framework for stabilizing culture in schools and communities.

The tagline on the event flyer is blunt: “You don’t have a youth problem.”

The model, according to event materials, is designed to help educators, parents, and youth-serving leaders transform how they understand identity, behavior, and accountability. Rather than focusing on correcting individual young people, the framework asks adults to examine the environments they build and whether those environments support responsibility, engagement, and growth.

Vallatine has built a career around that premise. He is the creator of the Live Above The Hype Hip Hop Life Skills Curriculum, which uses hip-hop and street culture as a lens for self-reflection and character development in gang- and drug-impacted youth, according to the Trauma Informed LA website. He also developed the Urban Youth Culture Competency and Engagement training system, according to Trauma Informed LA.

His book, “Beyond The Crack Generation: Surviving a Trauma Organized Culture,” is used as coursework at universities, according to the Peer to Peer Learning Academy.

Vallatine has lectured at the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work, Howard University, and San Diego State University, according to his professional profile. He has worked with incarcerated youth in Los Angeles County juvenile halls and detention camps, and served as a teacher and school board member for a San Gabriel Valley charter school, according to Trauma Informed LA.

“We provide communities with trauma-informed professional development that enhances the lens and strengthens the skills of youth service providers,” Vallatine said in an interview with Voyage LA Magazine. “We also offer a socially relevant life skills & character development curriculum that helps educate gang and drug impacted youth to make healthy life decisions.”

The venue, the Alkebulan Cultural Center at is a Northwest Pasadena institution founded in 1989. The center, housed in a historical landmark Pasadena firehouse, was established by Versie Mae Richardson, Emerson R. Terry, and Dr. Maria Battle to provide education and cultural programming focused on African and African American heritage, according to the center’s nonprofit profile.

The workshop begins at 1:00 p.m. on April 11 at the Alkebulan Cultural Center, 1435 North Raymond Avenue. The center’s phone number is (626) 794-4647.

“Empathy is by far the most important quality to our success,” Vallatine said in the Voyage LA interview. “Keeping our fingers on the pulse of the communities we serve and being willing and able to see from their viewpoints is key.”