SBCC’s Escape Room Kids at Challenger Middle School

Lake Los Angeles - Back in December we began to brainstorm our next project for 2025. In 2024 we executed “Escape to Deliver” were youth, their parents and I delivered food to the local community at the weekly Meals in Motion food drive. This year we are determined to focus on developing our own green project that compliments the work being done in Lake Los Angeles and in the broader Antelope Valley. This project, Escape to a Healthy Planet focuses on clean spaces, recycling and hygiene. Let me explain.

One of our goals is to leave a space cleaner than it was. Escape Room identifies, organizes, and agrees to a clean-up in a space safe and gets to work. The second goal is to allocate any recyclables and re-usable waste (able to be handled safely by us) to the appropriate processing centers to get recycled and re-used. Any recyclables collected by us now are processed at a recycling center and the money received is managed by Escape Room. Our third and last goal is to have a wide array of hygiene products available to our community, when they need them, for free. So, the money we receive for any recyclable and reusable products goes to the purchase of these items.

In January, Silvia Avina and Adrian Falcon, our Adult Youth Leads, led a Pilot Clean up with Escape Room around the SBCC building and the neighboring structures. There they noted positive aspects, mistakes and offered suggestions for a future clean-up.

Yesterday, with the help of others, we applied those suggestions. Mr. Mayberry and Ms. Torres welcomed us to the Challenger campus to clean up and clean up where we could. Philip from LA County Public Works Road Yard #555 came to lend some supplies to help our work. He also came by to pick up and took the waste we picked up. We focused on the soccer field, track, and empty spaces on the west side of the campus.

We picked up a significant amount of trash. I noticed a lot of trash up against the fences. The wind scatters waste. So, we noted that and plan to talk about it during our debrief trash. It goes without saying that we picked up a lot of recycling. We also picked up small amounts of e-waste. We also found a school ID that one of our participants recognized the owner off, we will return that ID to them.

Joel Catalan expressed his view on the project t by saying, “We want to clean up and help out the community unity. We want to keep this place clean and nice.”

Miguel Falcon added, “We will turn our recycles in for money to use to buy hygiene products.”

Isaac added, “We will buy deodorant and give it to all of those in need.”

There’s more. But we’re going to sit down and debrief during our next Escape Room Session to analyze and continue our efforts. So, more planning!

Escape to A Healthy Planet 2-27-25

By Carlos Baltazar

Community Organizer - TheCenter@Wilsona by SBCC