Welcome to today’s interview, where we have the privilege of speaking with two remarkable individuals who are deeply involved in a partnership that is profoundly impacting the lives of teenager impacted by incarceration. 

The PATHfinder Club and POPS the Club have come together with a shared mission to foster and empower young people facing adversity, and our guests today have played pivotal roles in this collaboration.

First, we have Amy Friedman, a passionate advocate for youth empowerment and a dedicated leader in POPS/the Club/The PATHfinder Club. Amy has spent several years working tirelessly to create opportunities and guide teenagers who often face significant life challenges. 

Amy is an author and criminal justice activist. In 2013, she and her husband, Dennis Danziger, a writer and high school teacher, established POPS the Club as an all-encompassing environment for young people who have been marginalized and muted due to their involvement with the prison system. 

Amy founded POPS the Club as a nonprofit to create and support clubs for teens who have been impacted by incarceration, primarily the children and other loved ones of the incarcerated and deported.

From a single club at Venice High School in Los Angeles, POPS the Club expanded to schools across the country. On 1 February 2023, The Pathfinder Network assumed responsibility for the operations and management of all POPS the Club programming. 

The next guest on our list is Leticia Longoria-Navarro. Leticia is the Executive Director of The Pathfinder Network. 

This nonprofit provides justice system-impacted individuals and families with the tools and support they need to be safe and thrive in our communities. 

Having been affected by parental and family incarceration, Leticia is an expert on the profound impact of incarceration on the whole family. She is an advocate and founding team member of The PATHfinder Club.

Both are here to discuss The Pathfinder Club, POPS, and the recent publication Advice to 9th Graders: Stories, Poetry, Art & Other Wisdom, from Out of the Woods Press, the publishing arm of The Pathfinder Network.

Norm: Good day, Amy and Leticia, and thanks for taking part in our interview.

Can you tell us more about the mission and goals of The PATHfinder Club and POPS the Club and how they came together in partnership?

Amy: My husband, Dennis Danziger, and I founded POPS the Club nearly eleven years ago at Venice High School in Los Angeles where Dennis was a high school English teacher. 

I had previously been married to a man who was incarcerated. I came to understand in a deeply personal way the impact his incarceration had on my own life, but more profoundly on his daughters whom I raised. 

We all were stigmatized and shamed. When I learned 1 in 14 children in the U.S. has a parent who is or has been incarcerated, I realized that in every single classroom there were kids like my daughters—kids feeling alone and hiding for fear of being further stigmatized and misunderstood. We decided to start a club for these young people—a place where they would feel safe and where they could speak openly about the impact incarceration had on their lives. 

From the moment we founded that first club and experienced the extraordinary strength, joy and comfort those first 20 members felt, we decided we would do all we could to support these kids. 

We also are both writers, and writing teachers, and we decided that part of our program would include an annual publication—with three goals in mind. 

First, creating art and writing can be healing and the experience of creating a book (with both artwork and writing) was an opportunity to support these young people in their healing process; second, we wanted to make sure the books we produced were professionally produced, respectful of their hard work; and third, we know how wise and knowledgeable these youth are, how much they have to teach the world about the true impact of the American addiction to incarceration is. 

Over the course of the 10 years, we led the organization, including through the challenging Covid years when POPS contracted a bit, we established clubs in more than 18 schools in five states, and throughout that time we refined the work through the many lessons we learned. 

We also began to reach out to organizations like The Pathfinder Network in Oregon as we looked for ways to further support our growth.

Leticia: The PATHfinder Club was inspired by the POPS Club model, and created with guidance from Amy and Dennis. 

We knew that our community had a need for safe spaces where youth impacted by incarceration, detention, and deportation could come together, break bread, and share about their challenges and their successes. 

Our first PATHfinder Club began in May of 2022 at Parkrose High School here in Portland, and quickly grew to over 20 members. 

With the PATHfinder Club, our goal is to foster an environment where club members feel comfortable and confident to stay connected to school and other supportive programming, expand their resilience, conquer challenges, embrace opportunities for healing and self-expression and connect in meaningful ways with their peers, loved ones and their community.

After many months collaborating we were honored to take over operations of POPS Clubs in the beginning of 2023 in an effort to provide greater support to POPS Clubs, create a wider breadth of opportunities, to expand the model and increase the number of clubs across the country. 

We now operate POPS Clubs across the country and are using our learning to develop an enhanced and expanded model that we will launch in other schools. 

We have seen some truly incredible outcomes from POPS and The PATHfinder Club, and are so excited to be embarking on this next chapter of the work. 

Norm: Amy, what inspired you to dedicate your time and effort to creating opportunities for disadvantaged teenagers?

Amy: As I mentioned above, my specific goal was to support kids like my daughters, children who have or have had loved ones in prison or jail. 

I wouldn’t necessarily describe the POPS and PATHfinder youth as “disadvantaged,” though it is absolutely true that incarceration rates in the US decidedly disproportionately impacts people in poor communities and in communities of color.

We focused on teenagers for two reasons—first, those were the kids my husband was teaching, and when we married, I through a PEN America grant teaching memoir writing to teens. 

But too, as my daughters became teenagers, they became more and more depressed and isolated as a result of their sense that they must keep their father’s whereabouts a secret lest they be labeled and shamed as they had been when they were young. 

Being a teenager is hard enough—a time of life when your hormones are raging and you are trying to establish your identity—but doing so while walking around holding onto a secret, or feeling judged for something over which you have no control—that is daunting. 

Also, we modeled the design of the first club after the first club for gay students in the United States, a club started by one man at one school in 1988—that eventually became the Gay Straight Alliance. 

Over the course of Dennis’s 20+ years teaching, he’d seen the way those clubs had entirely changed the entire culture of schools for the better. 

We wanted children (and other loved ones) of the incarcerated to feel open, free to express themselves, unafraid of being judged. And we saw that happening from the first weeks that first club met.

Norm: Leticia, as the Executive Director of The Pathfinder Network, can you summarize the organization's work and its focus on justice system-affected individuals and families?

Leticia: The Pathfinder Network serves individuals, youth, and families who have been impacted by the criminal legal system with evidence-based and responsive programming, services and supports designed to meet the specific needs of our communities. 

We meet people right where they are; in prisons, jails, transition centers, probation and parole offices, schools, community spaces, and even their own homes, in order to provide responsive support and help justice-impacted people and families reach their goals. 

We were founded in 1993 with a focus on providing cognitive-behavioral classes in one Oregon prison. In the 30 years since, we have grown to offer classes in most of Oregon’s prisons. 

While working with people who were incarcerated, we identified needs in our community for supportive services tailored to families impacted by incarceration. 

In 2005, we opened the Center for Family Success in Portland, where families with involvement in the criminal legal system and other systems can come for services and support to help them to navigate barriers and assist them on their path to thriving. Today, the Center offers youth mentor programs, early childhood home visiting, parenting and cognitive behavioral classes, parent mentoring, wraparound case management, and more supports for justice-impacted families. 

We expanded again in 2021 to create the Resilience & Recovery Project and began offering peer support and service navigation support for people who were systems-involved. 

Today, we have grown to an organization of almost 100 employees, with over 20 programs and 18 locations across the state of Oregon as well as POPS Clubs in California, New York, and Georgia. We continue to respond to the needs of our communities every day, launching new programs and expanding our service offerings to best support justice-impacted individuals and families in removing barriers and thriving. 

Norm: Could you share some insights into the impact of the Advice to 9th Graders anthology on the lives of the teenagers it aims to empower?

Amy: Advice to 9th Graders is one of the writing and art-making prompts we used right from the start in the various POPS clubs, and we were always stunned by the wisdom the kids came up with when they chose to write to that prompt. 

Because 9th grade is such a tough time for kids, Leticia and I talked about how wonderful it would be to produce our first co-produced book as something that every 9th grader everywhere in every school—no matter their life experience—might want to read. Some of the kids responded quite literally to the idea, and much of the book contains flat out advice from those who know most intimately what it feels like to be a teen. 

But some of the book also moves into other territory—delving into the thoughts, dreams, fears, desires, longings and wisdom teenagers (and young adults, since some of the writers are POPS grads) experience. 

We know that young people can’t get enough of the work in the previous anthologies we’ve published, and we’re confident this one will strike a chord as well. 

Leticia: Hearing your experiences reflected in the stories of others, especially the hard ones, can really help lessen the impact of stigma, shame and adversity. 

Feeling like you are not alone in your experiences can create powerful shifts and open the door to meaning, healing and power. 

That is what we create in Clubs and that is what we hope to expand on in Advice to 9th Graders. 

We also believe the wisdom in this anthology extends to anyone in need of inspiration and wisdom. Every time I open the anthology, I find something new that inspires and supports, or makes me smile or laugh. 

Norm: How are the contributions in the anthology selected, and what is their purpose? 

Amy: Every POPS and Pathfinder student and graduate is invited to submit work for consideration. 

Over the course of approximately 10 months, we work closely with the teachers and volunteers and staff who lead the clubs to support them in supporting their students to create work—whether poetry, story, essay, haiku, painting, photograph, drawing, or mixed media—and we read and review everything that is submitted. 

As editor of the volume, I will also sometimes request revisions. We accept all work submitted and revised.

Leticia: Art, writing, and mindfulness are central to the Club models, so every club meeting involves an activity that offers an opportunity to process and create meaning and coping through mindfulness, community building, art and writing. 

Most of the pieces you will read in the anthology come from Club sessions, where youth have the opportunity to process and work through whatever might be coming up in their lives. 

Our amazing Club staff and volunteers work with members to identify pieces that they would like to submit for consideration, and Amy has an incredible skill for finding and compiling the submitted pieces while making sure everyone in represented. 

Our purpose is to share the stories of the impacts and each piece selected helps us tell this story powerfully. We want to support, educate and change hearts and minds to help counter the impact of mass incarceration and systems-involvement. 

Norm: How does the partnership between The PATHfinder Club and POPS the Club contribute to the anthology's significance?

Amy: I cannot say enough about the joy I feel at the “takeover” by The Pathfinder Network of this work. I had long hoped that the work would be able to continue, supported by an organization with a greater capacity than we had as a small, homegrown nonprofit. 

Leticia is a leader with such wisdom, grace and generosity of spirit, that this book to me feels like it is infused with all of that—and with that of her staff who led the work in creating 

The Pathfinder Club in early 2022. When in early 2023 The Pathfinder Club took over the POPS clubs, we scrambled fast to make sure this volume could be released reflecting the work of all the clubs, and our next volume (to be released in 2025) is already underway. 

Leticia: This partnership has brought so much opportunity, power and impact. 

We are so proud to be continuing on the legacy of POPS and the publishing projects that tell our stories and invite others into supporting individuals impacted by incarceration. 

To get to do this work alongside Amy and Dennis, who have been our light on this path, makes it so much more meaningful. 

The anthologies significance will grow and evolve as will our publishing efforts in support of our mission and vision. Advice to 9th Graders represents the best of us, our resilience and what is next for us! 

Norm: Can you elaborate on the importance of personal essays, poetry, art, and other creative expressions in helping teenagers navigate the challenges of high school?

Amy: I’ve been teaching personal essay and memoir to teens and adults for more than (gasp) 35 years, and what I know is that writing true stories about one’s life can be life-changing for anyone of any age. 

What is most potent and powerful to me about publishing teenagers is this: So often young people think no one cares about what they think, no one listens to what they have to say, no one takes them seriously. 

We are proving to them that this is not so, that we honor them, that we want to know what they are thinking, what they care about, what they have to say.

And there is this: kids (all of us) often feel all alone, but what they discover when they express their truths is how much they actually share in common with others. 

Also, sometimes writing about the toughest things is the first step to lifting the burden, the beginning of letting go of the pain or the fear one feels, and in the process, as I say to my students, “discovering what you don’t know you know.”

Leticia: The work we do in Club ripples through our communities; when we feel seen and valued for who we are, we are empowered to engage with our community and lift ourselves and others up. 

One of the beautiful things about the PATHfinder Club has been our ability to connect youth and their families with other services and opportunities, and how Club members have become such important members of our community. 

Art and writing provide a jumping off point to have some of those conversations that might not come up otherwise: about mental health, or what’s going on at home, or the pressures of being a teenager navigating systems. 

As Amy said, we often feel alone in our experiences with incarceration or other systems-involvement, but POPS and PATHfinder Clubs create this beautiful sacred and artistic environment where youth can show up as their full selves and be vulnerable, and trust that we’re here to hold space for them and help them achieve their goals, whatever they may be. 

Norm: What advice do you have for educators and organizations looking to engage with and support disadvantaged youth?

Amy: I don’t think I can speak to the word “disadvantaged” – because to me disadvantaged means so many things. 

For instance, many years ago several of the POPS kids and I were invited to speak to the kids at a very expensive private school in Los Angeles about our program. 

We were invited because the administration decided their kids might wish to volunteer at POPS. 

The students at this school had every financial advantage imaginable, but while we were there, I learned from the librarian that she had wanted to have a POPS club at the school because she knew at least 20 kids in the school who were coping with family incarceration. 

The directors of the school would not permit such a club to exist—in other words, they were stigmatizing the youth they served who could have used the club. So, I would say those kids were disadvantaged, which I realize is not generally speaking the way people think about disadvantage.

Now, that said, I think educators and organizations must find ways to listen to the kids they serve, to ask them questions, to recognize that they have knowledge and experience to share that can help guide the work we all are trying to do—and we all must learn to be flexible, able to roll with punches. Sometimes that’s tough. I’m still learning…

Leticia: As Amy lifted up, listening is key. I want to reinforce this. Listening and being present. You never know what is going on below the surface. My advice would be to stay curious and committed to understanding what is behind what we see. 

It is so easy to “see” a teen quiet, disengaged, shut off, uninterested or unmotivated AND there is a reason for what you are seeing. Be courageously curious about the why. 

Understand that the why is not solely about that person’s individual factors but also the social experiences and disadvantages they have lived. 

Understand that certain communities disproportionately experience social realities and disadvantages that can be absolutely weigh on them and impact their opportunities and potential. 

Advice to 9th Graders and the 8 prior anthologies share these whys and enlighten us with the how we can support in the most meaningful and powerful ways. They give us the path to really show up for youth in our communities. 

Norm: Could you share a memorable success story or moment that illustrates the positive impact of your work with teenagers?

Amy: There are so many stories I’d love to share, but I’ll start with Kat. She came to POPS about 9 years ago as a 14-year-old freshman. 

She was depressed and angry—a ball of energy who had been arrested at her middle school the year before for getting in a fight on the playground. 

She was struggling with what she later learned to describe as “the volcano inside her,” and her pain over her father’s addictions and periods of time in jail. 

That year she began to write—and to write, and write. She wrote about her pain, about her fury, about her desires. 

She thought about dropping out of school, but she loved coming to POPS club meetings, so she came to school those days, and then others because she made friends in the club. 

She is now 23 years old, a university graduate (the first in her family); she has begun to travel all over the world and will attend law school this year, and she still writes, a regular poetry blog, with work she shares with a big following. 

And she is happy, and close to her family, and she serves as a mentor and a speaker. 

Leticia: We’ve had the honor of being part of so many incredible stories through POPS and The PATHfinder Club, but I think these words from our PATHfinder Club student leader describe its impact best:

“So before I joined TPC I wasn't exactly the happiest kid ever. I was kinda stuck in this weird redundant cycle of waking up and going to school and going home and sleeping. 

It was just that every single day. It was basically textbook depression, and my life didn't really have a purpose. But one day [my friend] told me to come to TPC with her after school. 

I went with her, and something lit up inside of me that day. I had like a 20- minute long conversation with Amy and [my friend] and it changed the way I was thinking. Somehow my boring everyday cycle had a positive spin on it now.

I started going every Thursday and that even went into the summer clubs. I had something to look forward to every week. And that made me think, why not do more things that make me happy like this? 

I started doing more things that made me successful and I still am. I really think I owe it to everyone at TPC, you guys always helped me on my hardest days and pushed me towards what I deserve. I love you guys.”

Norm: How can individuals or communities get involved and contribute to the mission of empowering disadvantaged teenagers?

Amy: I’m going to leave this one to Leticia since she runs the organization now, and I know they are engaged with many plans for expanding the work. 

Leticia: There are so many ways to get involved in this work! First, you can purchase our anthologies to support POPS and PATHfinder Clubs directly; all proceeds go back into our clubs and the annual anthologies are an incredible opportunity for youth to have their work seen and appreciated. 

We also invite individuals and organizations to connect with us if they are interested in volunteering, in starting a Club in their own community, or if they’re just interested in learning more about the work we do (tpc@thepathfindernetwork.org).

If you would like to support the clubs directly, you can also make a financial contribution on our website at thepathfindernetwork.org/donate. 

We also invite anyone interested to follow us on social media, where we share not only stories about our clubs, but also advocacy opportunities, news articles, and other information about supporting people impacted by incarceration. 

Finally, we invite you to follow and share our Impacts of Incarceration video library, a virtual resource on YouTube designed to combat stigma and shame by sharing the stories, experiences, and wisdom of people impacted by the criminal legal system. It features 125 videos with 19 interviewees impacted by incarceration covering 10 key related topics. I am one of the 19 interviewees, and I invite you to check out this powerful resource and publishing project of our Clubs. 

Norm: What future initiatives or projects do you have in mind to further support and empower young people?

Amy: I continue to work as the publisher of Out of the Woods Press, and I visit the clubs as often as I’m able to do so to work with these young people, and to encourage them to follow their artistic dreams. 

I’m not sure what else is next for me, but I am trying to finish the memoir I’ve been writing for the past six or more years that is about my daughters, and the way their existence inspired me to dream and then to create this work. 

Eleven years ago, I published Desperado’s Wife, the story of my marriage to a man I met while he was in prison—it’s a tough book, and a little bit sad, and this book is, in essence, Part Two—and about how tough times can lead us to our greatest joys. 

Leticia: We are continuing to build out the POPS and PATHfinder Club curriculum in order to help others implement this model for arts-based support clubs in their own communities. 

We hope to expand and grow and evolve the model to expand its reach and impact. As we finish out our 30th year as an organization, we’re continuing to create more programming for youth across the spectrum of justice-involvement. 

We are also finding new ways to integrate The PATHfinder Club with other parts of our community: this year, TPC youth have participated in a youth arts council, a workshop to end gun violence in their community, and a filmmaking intensive. 

We’re continuing to identify new ways to integrate this model with other opportunities in our communities, and are working to spread this newest anthology far and wide in an effort to reach as many justice-impacted young people as we can in schools, libraries, and other spaces. 

We are excited to be kicking off work for our 10th anthology that will be released in 2025.

Norm: As we wrap up our interview, what are your future aspirations and goals for The Pathfinder Network's impact on individuals and families affected by the justice system?

Amy: My aspiration is to see the work grow and grow and grow, and to introduce people around the world to the work written and created by these brilliant, beautiful young people. 

Leticia: We are in an incredible moment of growth here at The Pathfinder Network, and partnering with POPS has brought us even further into national conversations and efforts. 

This year, our 30th year, we launched a new department, Partnered Impact, which is all about developing and growing partnerships to increase our impact alongside our direct service work. We see this work growing fast. 

My hope is that we can continue to build the direct service work we are doing, meeting people at every step of their involvement with systems, and that TPN can also continue to grow and expand more into the national space, and show that when you invest in people and believe in their capacity, whole communities grow stronger and more resilient. 

One way we see this growth and expansion happening with authenticity and integrity is continuing our commitment to engage people with lived experience in our work and carrying out our mission. 

This means employing staff and recruiting volunteers with lived experience and continuing to publish anthologies, like Advice to 9th Graders, that lifts up the voices, wisdom and resilience of those impacted by the system. 

Norm: Thanks once again and good luck with all of your future endeavors

FOLLOW HERE TO READ NORM'S REVIEW OF ADVICE to 9th GRADERS: STORIES, POETRY, ART & OTHER WISDOM.