Feb 27, 2024
Huckleberry Youth, the
non-profit providing care and housing for underserved youth,
celebrated 50 years back in 2017. In Part 1 of this episode, we
meet Huckleberry consultant/advisor Denise
Coleman and the organization's CEO/executive director,
Doug Styles.
Denise was born at what is now
Kaiser's French Campus on Geary. Denise, who is Black, shares the
story of the hospital making her dad pay cash for their labor and
delivery services, while it was obvious that white folks were
allowed to make installment payments.
Born and raised in the 1950s
and Sixties, Denise and her family lived in the Haight/Ashbury
neighborhood, as it was known then (now we call it Cole Valley) on
Belvedere Street. She has three sisters and a brother, her dad
worked two jobs usually, and her mom stayed home. She describes a
childhood that was fun, filled with activities like roller skating,
skateboarding, and homemade roller coasters.
Denise was a teenager during
the Vietnam War and took part in protests. She describes a history
of friction with her mom. When Denise was 16, one of her sisters
OD'd on drugs. Still, despite the trauma that came with that, she
graduated high school from St. Mary's in 1973. At this point in the
podcast, Denise rattles off the San Francisco schools she went
to.
After high school, she joined
some of her cousins and attended the College of San Mateo. Denise
never thought about or wanted to leave the Bay Area, she says. In
an apartment on the Peninsula, she and her cousins had "the best
time." After obtaining a two-year associate's degree, Denise says
she wanted to go to SF State, but didn't connect with it, and so
she started working instead. For two years, she flew as a flight
attendant for the now-defunct Western Airlines. After that, she
collected debt for a jewelry store, then worked as a credit
authorizer for Levitz Furniture in South San
Francisco.
Denise says she got hung up in
the crack epidemic in the Eighties. She started with cocaine, and
that led to crack. She was an addict for eight years. She got
herself into a rehabilitation program at Delancey Street and stayed in the program for seven
years. Her time started in SF, then took her to Santa Monica, North
Carolina, and New York state.
In 1998, Denise decided to
leave Delancey Street. She got a call from Mimi Silbert, the
Delancey founder, with an offer to work at their new juvenile
justice program in San Francisco. Denise said no at first, partly
because she wanted to stay in North Carolina. But after some
persistence from Silbert, in 1999, she said yes and came back to
her hometown. After seven years away, The City had
changed.
And so Denise helped to
establish Delancey Street's Community Assessment and Referral
Center (CARC). After its first year, the organization realized that
they didn't have the capacity to run the program. Delancey Street
asked Huckleberry Youth to take it over, and this is how Denise
ended up at Huckleberry.
Doug Styles was born and
raised in the Richmond District. He was too young to remember the
1960s and mostly grew up in the Seventies. Doug says he had a lot
of fun as a kid, describing riding his bike to the beach and back
by himself. He shares the story of going to a late movie in the
Mission, so late that when he got out, there were no buses. And so
he walked home through the Mission, through the Fillmore, to his
home in the Richmond.
He also rattles off San
Francisco schools he went to, including Lowell. Doug was in school
when the SLA kidnapped Patty Hearst. He was at Everett Middle
School when Dan White assassinated George Moscone and Harvey Milk.
He speaks to tensions in The City around this time, and Denise
joins in to talk about the day of the assassinations.
Doug graduated high school in
1983 and went to UC Santa Cruz, where he majored in theater. He
moved to Massachusetts, where he found work in a theater. After a
short time out east, he came back to San Francisco and tried
unsuccessfully to get into grad school. So he enrolled in a masters
program at CIIS for drama therapy. Following that degree, Doug went
back east, this time to Connecticut to work at the VA's National
Center for PTSD.
After another return to the Bay
Area, he got his doctorate in clinical psychology. At the VA, Doug
had worked with adults, but the jobs he found here had him working
with youth. He had a job on the Peninsula for 10 years, during
which time he became a father to two kids, which he says changed
him more than anything else.
One day he saw that the
Huckleberry Youth executive director was retiring. Doug applied and
got the job, and has been with the non-profit ever
since.
Check back next week for Part 2
and more on the history of Huckleberry Youth.
Photography by Jeff
Hunt
We recorded this podcast in December 2023 at Huckleberry Youth's administrative offices on Geary.