Hernán Carvente-Martinez ’15, a Queens, New York native, knows how hard it can be when you’re navigating complex life challenges while also struggling with mental health issues. That’s why he founded Healing Ninjas, a digital wellness platform created especially for BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) communities searching for mental health and healing resources. The work has garnered Carvente-Martinez a special recognition; he was awarded Reebok’s 2021 Human Rights Award (sponsored by the American Civil Liberties Union and Alabama State University). As a part of the award, Carvente-Martinez received $100,000 to honor his ongoing work to create a healing community for BIPOC people, close youth prisons, and reinvest in community-based alternatives to youth incarceration.
Carvente-Martinez, who works as a National Youth Partnership Strategist at Youth First Initiative, a non-profit seeking to end youth imprisonment, noticed a recurring problem facing underrepresented populations, a staggering lack of mental health resources. “That’s why I started Healing Ninjas,” he says. “When the pandemic was in full swing, there were so many young people reaching out to me who were struggling with their mental health as a result of the constant isolation they were going through.” We sat down with Carvente-Martinez to learn more about his work, incredible journey, and hopes for the future.
Growing Up in Two Worlds
Carvente-Martinez was born in Manhattan, but from the age of three to eight, he lived in Puebla, Mexico. “I still have vivid memories from my time in Mexico. We lived in a pretty poor community—we’re talking non-paved roads. The home I was living in was made of bricks without any sealants in between them. If it was raining, if it was windy, you would feel all of the environmental conditions around you in the house,” he says. Carvente-Martinez fondly remembers his mother’s cooking when they lived in Mexico—her getting the corn, drying it, turning it into masa, and frying it up into tortillas. “A tortilla with salt and sour cream was the meal for the day. I remember Mexico not being the most lavish living, but it was good.”
Unfortunately, generations of alcoholism and abuse took its toll on the family and Carvente-Martinez’s childhood. His father was an alcoholic, as was his grandfather. Over the years, the abuse got progressively worse. “My father came back to the States first, then I came back, and then my mother came. At first, I didn’t know what it meant to be a U.S. citizen. Then, when I was about 10 years old, I figured out that my parents came to the country from crossing the border, but because I was a U.S. citizen, I could just fly over the border whenever I wanted,” he says. While in America, Carvente-Martinez’s father thought it was cool and macho to give his eight-year-old son alcohol. “At some point, I started using alcohol as a coping mechanism and I ended up struggling with alcoholism very early on in life. After a while it wasn’t enough and I escalated to weed, then cocaine, and progressed to more violent activities at school, at home, and in the community. That’s what led my involvement with the criminal justice system.” When he was only 15 years old, Carvente-Martinez was charged as a juvenile offender and faced six years in a maximum-security juvenile prison in upstate New York.
Finding John Jay
While incarcerated, Carvente-Martinez earned his GED and 57 college credits under the guidance of an unflappable veteran named James J. LeCain, who became his teacher and mentor at the Brookwood Secure Center. “In his eyes, I saw for the first time a person who genuinely believed in me,” he says. As his release date neared, Carvente-Martinez applied to different colleges, including John Jay. Most of the other colleges wanted statements explaining his incarceration, which Carvente-Martinez felt unfairly stigmatized him. “John Jay was the only school that sent information back to me while I was still incarcerated. The week before I came out, they sent me a letter that said I had been ‘conditionally accepted,’ but I needed to provide more financial aid information—that was it, no statement explaining my incarceration.”
Fortunately for Carvente-Martinez, when he enrolled at the College, he connected with John Jay’s Institute for Justice and Opportunity (IJO, formerly known as the Prisoner Reentry Institute or PRI) and found a student mentor who got him involved in different on-campus organizations, and encouraged him to engage with the community. “I realized that there wasn’t a lot of conversations around juvenile prisons,” he says. “I wanted to have a space where people who cared about incarcerated youth could connect, so I co-founded the Youth Justice Club at John Jay.”
Before he graduated, Carvente-Martinez worked as an intern at the Vera Institute of Justice, and after impressing the staff there, he continued on as a research assistant. “Most of my work at Vera focused on conditions of confinement and improving how facilities supported young people. I learned at Vera that policy changes weren’t enough for some of the facilities. There was a culture that you could not get away from because it was built into the brick and mortar of those facilities,” he says. “So, I joined the Youth First Initiative and went from being a reformer to thinking very intentionally about the term ‘abolition’ and trying to reimagine a world where youth prisons were no longer a thing.”
Founding Healing Ninjas
At Youth First, Carvente-Martinez held group conversations or “visioning sessions” where he’d ask young people, “If you had the money that was saved from closing off youth prisons, what would you do with that money?” A shocking number of them mentioned creating mental health resources. It was a need that Carvente-Martinez completely understood. “Three years ago, I attempted suicide and nobody in the youth-justice world, or the broader community that I worked for, knew about it. I was burnt out, struggling financially, and had so many different things that I had gone through but never processed,” he remembers. “I didn’t want to admit to the world, who said I was the next ‘champion for change’ and all these fancy things, that I was struggling. I survived the attempt mostly because I jumped onto the train tracks and the train stopped within an arm’s distance of me. I didn’t know what else to do but run home. Five minutes later my daughter called me, asking if I was going to pick her up from school, and I knew I needed help.”
Finding the right therapy and the right support system was a challenge. “It took almost two years to find,” says Carvente-Martinez. “There were groups for Latinx folks, for African-American folks, for Indigenous folks, and for white folks, but I realized that the resources for white folks were much bigger compared to the other groups.” He started pulling together different resources that were traditional and non-traditional, city-funded and private; everything from conventional therapy sessions to art therapy was included in the mix. “I was very driven looking for a hundred different resources, tools, and places for BIPOC people and underrepresented communities to tap into and find healing.”
When Matt O’Toole, President of Reebok, gave him the news that he won their 2021 Human Rights Award, Carvente-Martinez felt both relieved and stunned. “I was just taken aback because Healing Ninjas was operating on fumes and volunteer energy. Along the way I was learning what it meant to build a business outside of the non-profit structure, and I started to think deeply about what it means to be formerly incarcerated, Latinx, and the founder of a tech and media company,” he says. Carvente-Martinez’s goal is to use some of the money to fund the work that he’s doing now with Healing Ninjas, and to also find ways to build on the capital and create generational wealth for both the Latinx and formerly incarcerated communities. “The award itself is an acknowledgment of two things: One, I’m still alive. And two, leaping into this idea was worth all the stress and hard work put into creating it.”
