Our Youth Need to Hear These Stories
Told by Brandy Del Gallego
Written by Laurie Grobman
Brandy Del Gallego began visiting Reading in 2016 as a college student attending the University of Valley Forge, a Christian university in Phoenixville. Stepping into Reading “felt like home.” Brandy grew up in urban communities like Union City, Jersey City, and North Bergen in New Jersey, about 20 minutes away from New York City. The cities are architecturally and spatially similar. These areas surrounded her with a regular blend of both Spanish and English languages. She drove to Reading for delicious Colombian, Mexican, and Puerto Rican food. “I always try to find my culture’s food because being so far away from my grandmother, I don’t get to experience a lot of the home-cooked Colombian food unless I make it myself.” Brandy loves Reading’s uniqueness and feels that cities across the East Coast have “a similar heartbeat” – people wanting to come together with so many contexts and so many cultures that you can learn from and experience.
Brandy returned to New Jersey when the pandemic hit in her senior year of college. She finished her classes and graduated. She moved back to Pennsylvania with her boyfriend in late 2021, and they lived in Morgantown near his family. Again, Brandy felt that pull into Reading. When she was offered a job at the Olivet Boys and Girls Club in 2023, Brandy was thrilled. She is the organization’s Director of Wellness, a mental health, social emotional learning, and community resource specialist. She loves working with youth and knows each one has the potential to overcome any challenges they face. Because she did it herself.
Brandy remembers the adults in her life who were real, telling her “You know, I lived a life just like yours, and I believe in you because others believed in me.” Brandy was “was one of those youth who had doors closed in my face and who was kicked out of programs, and unfortunately, I chose the streets in a lot of ways.”
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In her youth, Brandy got into a lot of trouble. She was rebellious, a rule breaker, defiant to authority figures. She had an “I don’t give an f” attitude and hung out with friends who felt similarly: “It was almost like a double life because I had great attendance at school, teachers really enjoyed my work, but once the bell rang it was time to hang with my friends and be wild. We were all kind of trying to grow up really fast, speaking like adults from a young age, using curse words and copying the things we would view at home and in the world around us.” Around the neighborhood, she’d see fliers of missing kids and “wanted” criminals and huddles of day laborers waiting on the street corners every day. She remembers lockdowns in summer camp and school to prepare them for intruder alerts and bomb/gun threats.
In her home, there was a lot of love, but a lot of stress, anger, and some significant untreated traumas and mental illness. Brandy had a well-rounded home life, but life is
expensive, parents have to work, and both Brandy and her sister were enrolled in every extended day and after-school program you could think of at that time. Brandy and her sister spent all day at school and after school programs, and getting home to mom and dad was typically later at night. Her parents were fun-loving, life of the party parents who have shaped her view of life, and she is grateful to them. Brandy also shared that domestic violence is a reality that her family had to endure, and it took a big toll on each of them: “My parents loved each other, but it was not a healthy love, and that’s how abuse happens.”
In ninth grade, after her parents divorced, Brandy, her sister, and mother moved to the suburbs. Everything began to change. Brandy recalls that her mother had an encounter with Jesus that began to have a strong impact on their family, and although her mother was alone in her faith journey at the time, eventually faith became the foundation of their lives.
Brandy struggled to care when it came to school, because where she grew up academics were not a marker of a person’s success or popularity. But when she moved, everything changed. Brandy remembers showing her 9th grade report card to a new friend who was shocked at Brandy’s mediocre grades. She told Brandy that if her grades looked like that, her parents would have killed her! But Brandy had not known that “grades matter” as much as they did and do. In her urban community, being smart was not cool. But it was a necessity to survive in the suburbs.
Academic success became important to Brandy because she slowly started to learn that knowledge really is power.
High school and college were major pivot points for Brandy as she worked every day to become a better, positive, highly educated person. She still had struggles and trauma that continued to compound, and substance use became a lingering maladaptive coping mechanism. Brandy said that “if not for Jesus, and His presence in my life, I don’t even want to imagine where I would be in life today.”
Brandy attributes the dramatic shift in her life to her faith and the Lord. She is a victor, not a survivor: “I feel like I have really overcome a lot of the challenges of my past, mainly because I feel God has chosen to bring me out of that identity of brokenness and into an identity of wholeness.” Brandy felt found, and this tapped into her inner strength to know she needed help and to surrender to God.
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Brandy’s experiences inform her work as the mental health and community resource specialist at the Olivet Boys and Girls Club. As a first-generation Colombian American, Brandy grew up believing that mental illness “is a made-up thing, and you’re just being dramatic, and you’re being a baby, and you should toughen up and man up.” Through her own experiences and a lot of effort, Brandy realizes that understanding mental illness is critical to helping youth develop their fullest potential and, in turn, they will resist turning to violence.
Witnessing and experiencing violence accelerates youth’s growth and personality development, but it stunts certain necessary brain functions. When they’re comfortable around violence and being unsupervised, it’s easier for youth to put themselves at risk or in compromising situations without realizing how quickly those things can impact your entire life. The pull to the streets is so strong right now due to the shift in our cultural messaging through media, and there is such immense pressure on kids to seek fame and quick fortune rather than longevity, healthy outcomes, and hard work towards their dreams.
Yet Brandy feels extremely optimistic about Reading’s youth and their determination, grit, and perseverance to rise above the temptation for violence. They have a tenacity and strength that with support from intentional adults can propel them to overcome some of the challenges they have experienced, whether those barriers were food insecurity, domestic and other forms of violence, and bullying. They need to be shown that there are many paths in life. “I believe exposure to the many avenues they can travel and the many paths they can follow in life, whatever they may be, will motivate these young people to rise into their full potential.”
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Brandy believes in the power of storytelling. God Himself came to this earth, and he chose stories, through the Bible, to reach the people. His stories live on to this day.
By sharing her story, Brandy hopes others will learn from her experiences. “You don’t really know a person or their life context until they start talking, until they start sharing their story.” And our youth need to hear these stories: “That adult who is there for me was once a child, and this was also their life. The experiences of others, in step with my own, have given me timeless tools that I carry with me every day.”
Brandy also believes that kindness, simple actions like a wave and a smile, will go a long way toward healing our community, thereby providing hope for a better life for our youth: “If people were a little bit more mindful, a little bit more cautious, a little bit more present, things could really change more.” In the end, “People have an individual responsibility to each other to be gentle when the world is not.”