In a modest retail house at an East Durham strip shopping mall, 25 teens are pretending to celebrate their 100th birthdays.

“I under no circumstances predicted to stay this extensive,” says My’dia, a 13-12 months-previous with glasses and prolonged crimson braids. She’s standing at the entrance of the place, providing her birthday speech to her fellow pseudo-centenarians.

In her youth, she states, she was shy, friendless, and unproductive with her absolutely free time, squandering beneficial hrs by binge-seeing TikToks and sleeping. But when she turned 13, she enrolled in a summer time system called POOF that improved the trajectory of her existence she uncovered a passion for modeling during a industry journey to a style conference, she states, and went on to graduate from manner school and get paid $20 million a calendar year modeling for Gucci and Balenciaga.

At 40, after marrying and obtaining two kids, she switched profession paths and turned a therapist.

“The legacy I still left driving was being a fashionista, a diva, a very good mother, and a therapist that helps other individuals,” My’dia concludes.

Leaving behind a legacy is a main topic listed here at POOF, a teenager training center tucked in between a splendor supply retail store and a Household Greenback on North Miami Boulevard. POOF—which launched in May well as a summer camp but will shortly commence working as an following-college program—aims to deliver a safe, stimulating place for East Durham teens to hone their entrepreneurial expertise, master monetary self-sufficiency, and start off wondering about vocation paths.

The program’s name, a double acronym that stands for both equally “Planning Our Very own Future” and “Planning Our Own Funeral,” speaks in aspect to the established of options that experience young people coming of age in East Durham. East Durham’s violent criminal offense amount is 42 p.c higher than the citywide average—which, notably, is 73 percent bigger than the national average—and in some East Durham neighborhoods, as lots of as 82 % of small children are living in poverty, in accordance to the 2021 Durham Neighborhood Gang Assessment.

POOF founder Future Alexander, who was born and lifted in East Durham, suggests many of the youngsters in the summer season program have been mates with the teenage female who was killed in the nearby Wedgewood…