And Life Goes On For High Road NYC

Harlem, New York City. The street numbers 125. The heat measures not far off that. Fiona Yin ‘27 and Yuchan Son ‘26, chow down on some arroz con pollo from the Dominican restaurant around the block. In between bites, they laugh with one of their supervisors, Miguel Walters, demanding he come to their internship’s final showcase next week. “You give me a time and place,” Walters quits the kidding around. “I’m there.” 

The New York City High Road Fellows are lucky. People show up for them in every direction–a testament to the ILR community, the organizations they’re working with, and, it seems, humankind in general. 

Rober Taylor is no exception. He’s the executive director of Youth Action YouthBuild (YAYB), an education and training nonprofit based just east of where Yin and Son are spending their summer at Manhattan Community Board 10. Taylor spoke with last year’s High Road fellows and returns for year two, embodying his commitment to showing up for young people.

Taylor and YAYB work with opportunity-youth who were unable to finish school. “And that could be for a lot of reasons,” began Taylor. “Learning disabilities, life issues, housing instability; they may have had contact with the criminal justice system, or they just decided that, you know, ‘school is just not for me.’ So, they come to our program when they're ready to re-engage.”

“We take it as a grace every day that they show up,” beamed Taylor. Once the youth are in the program, “they're still contending with a lot of life issues…they may have to work, or they're taking care of other children, or they, themselves, don't have a house, they’re not living anywhere, or they're trying to figure out how to get stabilized, or they're hungry.”

Talking to a room full of Cornell students about this, the irony is not lost. It’s a far world from Ithaca and the opportunities some of these students now have. But this is what High Roads NYC plainly reveals: Life, and nothing more–Communities shorted against, stop-gapped 125 blocks away from Wall Street’s boom-bust bets and Nasdaq winnings. The disparities are clear, yet Life remains real, urgent, vital, important. For people struggling to stay housed and fed, as well as those overlooking Central Park from the 80th-floor penthouse, life goes on.

Showing up isn’t some slogan or inspirational poster taped to a wall under flickering neons. “I see myself as a facilitator more so than someone who is empowering someone,” said Taylor. “I think people empower themselves. But you can help facilitate their empowerment. And so being able to connect them to resources, setting the structures for them to make things happen for themselves is sort of how I envision my work.”

“We were inspired,” began Holly Wallace, benefactor of the program alongside her husband Ed Baum ‘81, “to support this program because it's engaged learning. And it engages us not only with all of you but also with the organizations that many of you are working with.” 

“My mom's a high school teacher,” spoke Stuti Tiwari ‘26 to Taylor, “and she's talked about how even though she's the one teaching, she's also learned a lot of lessons from the students. I was wondering, what would you say in your life has been a significant lesson learned from these youth?”

“Young people can smell fakes,” said Taylor, stony and straightforward. The fellows laugh in agreement–Taylor is as real as it gets. “So, to be as authentic as you can, I think it's important. Not trying to talk down to them. I've learned not to try to compare what my life was like growing up versus the life that young people today are growing up with, because it's very different circumstances.”

Riley McGuire ‘27 walks over to the theater district for a Broadway show, a newfound interest, passing along the way more people than her entire 17-students-per-grade hometown. On a bus home cutting through the city, Isabella Vargas watches soccer on her phone as her beloved Colombia put two past Uruguay, wading through spotty connection and texting her family at each buffering frame. Elsewhere, Tiwari and Marjory Lopez Ardon ‘26 cannot stop laughing about something, Davyn Jones ‘26 and Megan Gmytreasiewicz ‘26 show each other tweets and Instagram posts about the weekly ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ news events (this week, President Biden has announced he won’t seek re-election). Mark Freedenberg ‘26 and Kevin Ourvan ‘25, a classic duo, riff incessantly while Icema Castle ‘27 and Swati Sheth ‘26 sign a silent language only the other understands.

“Each generation has its own call,” explained Taylor, “And it has to rise to meet its own challenge. I try not to be the person who's disabling that by comparing it with how good I had it versus how good or how bad you have it or whether life is worse for you than it was for me. Everybody has unique circumstances. I think the challenge for me has been learning how to really be a partner to them, and not necessarily somebody trying to control them.”

The fellows find themselves in a strange world, foreign yet familiar, caught in a blur of anonymous suits and boots, the harsh, the gentle, the lucky, the unlucky and those to whom luck pays no mind. High Road NYC will soon draw to a close, but not before Walters shows up for Yin and Son’s final showcase: They’re part of the lucky. It’s overcast and muggy in the city today, heat trapped under a dense gray that lingers around the 80th floor of skyscrapers. Rain hangs on the horizon yet never comes. And Life goes on.