Founded in 2022, Native American Bay Area Reach Initiative (NABARI) is a free one-week camp for all high school youth that explores topics like social justice, decolonization, and higher education.
On Thursday, March 12, UNVEIL had the opportunity to speak with the creator of the NABARI, Kyle Lakatos.
NABARI is a free one-week camp for all high school youth that explores topics like social justice, decolonization, and higher education.
“He truly started the camp from the ground up,” former camp director Nikki Apana said. Latakos had the idea for this project while attending the University of California, San Francisco’s medical school and encountering the lack of Native representation in his field.
“Native folks represent maybe 1% of the population; there may be 0.1% in the academic field of medicine,” Lakatos said. “Our goal was to find a way to inspire the youth to explore ways that they can make their community stronger.”
To do this, he consulted with the Native American Health Center in San Francisco and UCSF, which then led to the creation of NABARI.
One of Lakatos’ first priorities was establishing a sustainability model.
“I led our first camp in 2023, and I was going to graduate in 2024. The question was, how do I make this go on beyond me?” Lakatos said.
Because all camp counselors are medical students, he needed to ensure longevity for the camp after each class graduates. He did this by adopting the “pay it forward” system, also known as the seven generations method in Native culture. In this model, senior counselors start their final year shadowing the camp director to better understand exactly how it is run. Then, they create a new plan for the next camp and make necessary adjustments.
“There’s a lot of mentorship happening across the grade levels,” Lakatos said.
Although the leadership is constantly changing, the camp covers the same major themes: belonging, mastery, interdependence, and generosity.
First: Belonging.
Here, campers get to know each other through discussions about who they are as people, how they identify, how the world sees them, and their values.
“It was so meaningful and rewarding to learn about each individual student,” Apana said.
Second: Mastery.
Students learn tools helpful for community organization and general communication skills. Moreover, they engage in conflict resolution exercises and have seminars on higher education and scholarships.
Third: Interdependence.
Campers participate in an open dialogue about racism, homophobia, and intersectionality through a poster activity. Students are split into three groups, each assigned to make a poster about different parts of Native history. One group has an abundance of markers, paper, supplies, everything they need, and more. The other has fewer materials, and the other has nothing but pen and paper and must work much harder than the others. The catch is that the groups were never told they can’t share resources. Instead, they are demonstrating how resources are often hoarded in a capitalist society, and groups with less are often forced to work more.
Fourth: Generosity.
The last theme is focused on different ways campers can give back to their communities and encapsulates the show-not-tell nature of the camp. They have a gardening day, discuss oppression, visit Alcatraz Island to learn about the 1970s occupation, and give concrete examples instead of attending a traditional indoor lecture.
As for future goals, Lakatos hopes to expand NABARI beyond a one-week camp to monthly follow-ups that allow participants to plan and explore impactful projects in their communities.
