Sandals Church Fights to Help Inland Empire Teens with New Center

The Hill Teen Center is named after the late educator and community leader Dr. Margaret Hill. The center will provide support for teenagers suffering from homelessness, hunger, gang violence, drugs, alcohol, and poverty.

San Bernardino, Calif. – The ROGO Foundation in partnership with Sandals Church, The San Bernardino City Unified District School Board, and small businesses across the Inland Empire is building The Hill Teen Center, a free community center, to provide essential services to Inland Empire teenagers in need of help.

To make The Hill Teen Center a reality the coalition seeks to raise $1.3 million on Giving Tuesday, November 29.

The Hill Teen Center will be a 10,000 square/foot facility that will deliver clinical counseling, tutoring, skill – and life-coaching, mentorship, laundry facilities, as well as a safe and fun environment for teenagers to spend time with friends in a safe place, all free of charge.

“The Hill Teen Center is named after the late educator and community leader Dr. Margaret Hill. The center will provide support for teenagers suffering from homelessness, hunger, gang violence, drugs, alcohol, and poverty,” said Chris Reinhard, Campus Pastor at Sandals Church in San Bernardino.

“The Hill Teen Center is a place for kids to go for hope, rather than despair,” said Dr. Scott Wyatt, Ed.D. Area Director, Student Services at San Bernardino County Superintendent of Schools, and School Board President of the San Bernardino City Unified School District.

Reinhard and Wyatt spent the last few years creating a solution to address these concerns understanding that the teens “just need a safe place to go.”

Inland Empire teens are in a state of crisis, said Reinhard with three out of 10 suffering from poverty in the immediate vicinity of the center, two out of ten in the city, and 1.5 out of ten in San Bernardino County, according to the United States Census Bureau.

One in ten of youths in the City of San Bernardino are “homeless.” In the 2019/20 school year, 30,270 San Bernardino County K-12 students were identified as homeless or lacking secure housing increasing 6.6 percent from the previous year.

“These factors, along with alcoholism and drug addiction have left too many students and their families hopeless, with little belief that their life will have any meaningful change,” said Pastor Reinhard.

“Now is the time to make a concerted effort to solve these problems and help our young men and women overcome these obstacles and regain the hope and the need to succeed in life,” said Pastor Reinhard.

“I live here, I serve the Sandals Church congregation right here and have fought to make a difference for more than 30 years. It breaks my heart to see children in such distress, it’s time to all work together to give our teens what they need to succeed. To do that, we need your donation today,” said Pastor Reinhard.

The Hill Teen Center is being built at 3701 N Sierra Way, in San Bernardino. The location is a closed building owned by Sandals Church San Bernardino.

Sandals Church currently provides essential services to the community, including office space for existing non-profit organizations that provide essential services to the youth of the Inland Empire.

For more information about The Hill Teen Center, go to TheHilltc.com/GivingTuesday, or call The ROGO Foundation at (951) 800-7865.