Education is an opportunity for anyone to be successful. Growing up in between apartments and houses located in immigrant neighborhoods, my dreams to attend college were brittle, driven by my Chicano identity but lacking sufficient resources to attend higher education.

The teenagers of the Westwood Teens Leading Change (TLC) are a passionate group of middle and high school students dedicated to making a difference by empowering teenagers to take the lead in creating positive changes, fostering resilience, and supporting mental well-being among peers.

Sometimes it feels as though public libraries—free, government-supported, circulating libraries—have always been part of American life, but public libraries were rare before the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

In this year's TLC project, our focus is on library beautification. As teens, our motivation for undertaking this project lies in recognizing that libraries are vital community spaces.