Bo Lembo spoke about his time in the Public Art Scene, running youth programs, and adjusting back to in-person programming.

Robert ‘Bo’ Lembo graduated from UMASS Dartmouth with a Fine Arts degree where he shortly afterwards became the director of the Revolving Museum. He is currently the Gately Youth Center’s director located in Cambridge, MA, where he has worked for over 15 years. I first met Bo as one of the youths enrolled at Gately and still consistently visit the center because of family and friends who are also enrolled.

I sat with Bo in his office at the center on a Monday afternoon, an hour before kids starts pouring in. Two staff members had called out for the day, three others got in late. Meetings for both the pre-teen and middle school side of the youth program started late and before our interview even begun and participate and their father came in to talk to talk to the director. “It’s just business as usual” Bo told me before we began.

Responses have been lightly edited for clarity.

Interviewer
Bo’s Response

What is your exact job title at the Gately [Youth Center]?

It’s not as fancy as you would think, I am a youth center director.

I thought it was director, but I know Melinda [another staff member at Gately] also has a director title.

Yeah she is a program director, and the delineation is a youth center director is the administrator of a building like the principal. And the program director is the person who decides what activities young people have and guidance to support the staff to do that, so they get to be creative.

That leads into my first question. I know you graduated university in a Fine Arts degree, so you did a lot of stuff in the Boston Public Art scene. So, what projects or jobs did you do and what did you love about it?

It was such a fun time to be active in the art scene in Boston. I graduated from college in 1993 or 4 and right out of school, it was a recession, right out of school I got a job as a fine arts print maker. And I was kind of proud of that because it was very difficult to get a job that paid in the arts. But ended up, you know I was really working too many hours for too little money. Umm wasn’t really living much of a life. So, I did that for two years, and because I worked seven days a week all day and most of the evening, I had a lot of money put away. And while I was doing that, I ran into a public artist by the name of Jerry Beck, who’s still practicing in Massachusetts. He was a member of the Revolving Museum, which was a collective of artists from all over the world who reclaimed abandoned spaces and animated them based on the history of those spaces with the people who live in that community at the time. They were really fun projects.

That’s so cool! Was that the main project that you did, or did you do more?

This organization would do two to four large scale projects a year, and then we had ongoing projects. We had a studio program, we had a gallery program. By the time I left that organization, I was running the youth program and the studio program and the gallery program. I basically had three jobs and I was back at that place where I was working around the clock.

Oh, that must have been a lot.

Yeah it was, but I had a lot of energy, I was young.

That also leads to my next question which is how did you become an educator and work with youth programs?

I became an educator through the Revolving Museum. In the early 90s, the Republican senator and Congress changed the way arts were funded in the United States. There was a fellow named Newt Gingrich, who was a very powerful politician who defund the arts. And individual artists could no longer easily access money to make their work, but they did funnel that money, they didn’t take it out of arts, they put it into youth arts programs and community arts programs. So, I slowly started working with young people as a way of paying my bills.

I learned pretty quickly, maybe two or three years into it, that I love teaching so much more than I like to make things. And that was my path, I did youth-based projects for 5-6 years, one of my clients was Cambridge Youth Programs. And then I went to work for an organization called Medicine Will, which worked with young people in crisis. I ended up teaching high school for two years, then middle school for year. And all that time I was like, “I like doing that art thing in Cambridge” so I applied for a job as a program director here in Cambridge Youth Programs, based on my positive experience with them when I was a contractor, doing one off projects with them.

And you’ve been here since like the 90s or—

I think 1999 was my first project in Cambridge. I was working on a grant that I got. I got a NEA grant, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, to do a five-year project with five cities and one of them was Cambridge.

That’s so cool! I never knew that [about you], so I love that. *laughs*

*Laughs* Yeah the project was called the House of Prince and I worked in communities that had high density immigrant populations to get them to tell their family stories through art.

So, was that also through Gately or was this before?

So that was the parent organization, Revolving Museum. They were the nonprofit that I wrote the grant through. I made myself the assistant artistic director of the project, I hired eight artists from different countries to go into schools and work with children from different communities. We worked in Lowell, Miami FL, Cambridge, Boston (where I lived) and New Bedford.

Those are definitely different, completely different cities comparing Florida and here [Cambridge].

The key is the population diversity, because that was the point: to try to work with communities with different ethnic and racial and religious backgrounds.

You’ve worked at Gately, as well as these other programs like we spoke about, for many years, meeting not only different youths in the programs but also their families as well as staff. So, what was your experience like meeting and connecting with all these different people?

I teach now to youth workers and to folks who want to do community work. In my opinion, being in one place for a long time gives you grandaunt trust and with trust you can make connections. I don’t know if that answers your question, but I’ve been meeting people in different ways based on the situation. When I was running an arts program, I would meet young people who were interested in the arts, and I’d meet their parents because their parents would come to the show and see their work and praise them. I would meet the younger brothers and sisters in the same way, they’d come to, you know, support their family.

But also, maybe there’s a family who’s in crisis and now in my position as a center director, I’m the first person that’s going to be meeting that family. They’re going to call or e-mail the center, they’re not going to just enroll, they’re going to say, “my family is going through X, Y & Z, how can you support my child?” And then those relationships become very tight very quickly because you have to trust someone to disclose that information and move forward.

So, the past two years with COVID, I know it disrupted a lot of plans that must have supposed to happen. I know with Gately, at some point you guys started doing activities over zoom. So, what was it like to go through all of that with COVID and having to work around that huge block?

Well, there was a lot of working around, but I can’t see that we were particularly successful in maintaining our community. When we went into lockdown, we thought we’re all going to be close like two weeks. I actually didn’t think we were going to be closed for two weeks, I thought we were going to be closed longer and my first concern was our staff: I was thinking of part time staff who could very quickly lose their jobs, there’s no security. The second day after lockdown, I signed up for an online zoom class through the Agenda for Children [program], which is one of our partners who provides a lot of professional development. I bought a zoom account right after that meeting, I called our two program directors and said, “we’re going to open up Gately online next week, let’s get all the staff together.” I started teaching them how to do zoom, through zoom, and we opened up about two months before our organization decided we should have done online programming. So, we were really out ahead and yet every week we lost kids. We started with, out of our 110 children, maybe we started with 15 the first week and by the end of lockdown we were down to zero children. It didn’t hold community the way that this organization is able to. It’s all about relationships, and it’s very difficult to have relationships, I think, through a screen.

Yeah and you don’t get that in-person connection that you do here [in the center] and build that relationship with staff or other children.

But then coming back had its challenges as well. There was a lot of social emotional learning (SEL) gaps that happened. Learning loss and learning gap, so we spent a lot of time building up that SEL muscle in our repertoire. We stop doing like sequential learning, in terms of like activities, and just focused on relationship building and basic social skills for a year and a half. And we’re just returning back to programming on October 3rd of this year, which is next week so it’s been that long.

It has been really long, that was actually what I wanted to ask next. Last year [June 2021] was when Gately started being in-person again, so what were your concerns adjusting back and what was the first thing you wanted to do as soon as you had come back?

I was one of those people who thought we came back too fast. It was mandated that we do, that I’m a frontline worker and it’s my responsibility or to give the job up. But I’m also the steward of this community and I didn’t want someone else to hold that without having the institutional knowledge and the personal relationships with the staff. But I, like many others, thought it was too soon to come back and be in-person with children. Because children, in general, aren’t fully aware of themselves and they’re not super sanitary. And all of us ride public transportation, none of our staff have cars, we were a perfect storm ready to happen. But we did pretty well.

Coming back, we had less than a third of the staff that were required to work with the children, and the industry has been decimated and that continues to be the case. So, the first problem was we didn’t have enough adults to work with the young people that wanted to be in the program. We had a waiting list a mile long, and we couldn’t hire or retain staff.

You said you came back too soon, but also that you lost that community online, so if it were up to you, what would you have done instead?

I don’t know if there’s a good answer. I don’t know if I could have come up with a better solution. We spent 80% of our time outside when we got back, and I think I would have liked to stay outside longer, *laughs* that’s one of the things. Or maybe have partnerships with folks who are expects in outdoor programming. I think that might’ve been helpful if we did that.

I know that you have the connections with a bunch of different programs to be able to create field trips and activities, so would you have done that when you guys were starting to come back since you did not do much of it at the time?

We did a lot of online partnerships when we were when we were virtual at home. When we came back, we weren’t allowed to partner anymore. We couldn’t put children in a van, we couldn’t use public transportation with them, and we couldn’t move people. So, we didn’t have a lot of partnerships when we came back. Even the public libraries were closed, you know, and that’s a basic part in every neighborhood, librarians are amazing and you’re always going to partner with them. So, every organization that we were going to partner with would have the same problems us which is: they couldn’t move their people and they were understaffed. But our partnerships are picking up again!

Talking about partnerships, what do you think was the best or your favorite one?

I think I can answer the best one and it’s one I inherited but has deepened over the years. We partner with the Rindge Avenue Upper Campus [the middle school right next to the youth center]. That partnership has allowed us to serve families on a deeper level, both in the school and in after school. I’m not saying that we have this seamless relationship where one merges into the other, but the impact on young people has been just really impressive. I think that’s the best partnership: when the out-of-school can partner with the school. And it’s not the same entity, because many schools have the after-school program in their school. I think that’s different, we are our own, we are the experts in our field and we’re experts in social emotional development and community building. And the school is our experts in delivering academic materials and building an educational environment. But when you put us together, they can really impact families over generations. We have, like how we’re having multiple people in your family, right?

That’s true, *laughs* that actually of leads into my next question. You must have seen a lot of youths grow up over the years, such as myself, so how do you think you’ve grown yourself as well as seeing these youths grow up?

Oh, it’s really edifying. Our very first life skills development class was called ‘You the Man,’ it was focusing on young men who weren’t ready to go to high school, we did that in 2009. One of the fellas who went through that, he’s a mailman and he was in the neighborhood. He came by and just wanted to thank us for our program, this happens weekly. You go out on the street, and you run into folks that you worked with years and years ago. But you know, I have done it long enough that I know the children of the children that I have worked with. Two of the program directors here were 10-year-olds that I worked with and now they’re the directors of the program: Joren Reed and Xavier Cortez.

That is amazing! Well, that’s all the questions I have for today. Is there anything else you want to tell me?

I’d say that this field is probably one of the most important fields, especially in densely populated areas like cities. Cities need youth development professionals that can work around the clock because parents have to work. It’s a field that is not properly funded, not properly staffed. It doesn’t get as much credit as it deserves. So, I think if you’re a voter, think about having a candidate that has on their platform—childcare. Everybody has a plan for schools, but we have to look at the whole child. When you vote, look for people who are talking about after-school.