TRITON Magazine Winter 2018 | Page 30

ON THEIR WAY Reality Changers has produced college students at all UC and Cal State campuses , as well as Dartmouth , Duke , Princeton , Columbia and Harvard , just to name a few .
“ I WANTED TO FIND A WAY to practice my Spanish outside of the classroom ,” says Yanov . “ But the way it ended up , it seemed like our lives were on the line nearly every single night . One night , I went to two funerals for two different kids , both teenagers buried in their soccer uniforms . I didn ' t want to have to do that anymore .”
With a youth group made up of local gang members , Yanov attempted to show how the rivalries they were involved in were destructive and prove they could do more with their lives . He immersed himself in the work , moving out of the dorms and into an apartment near the Iglesia , taking classes on campus by day and spending nights working with the cholos . He dressed in their baggy jeans and oversized white T-shirts and shaved his hair down to a quarter inch of bristle . He drove them to the hospital when they got beaten up and became their lifeline whenever there was trouble . “ Every time the phone rang , it was something ,” he recalls . “ Once I was in it , nothing else really mattered .”
The cholos liked Yanov , but they didn ’ t change . They still quit school as soon as they could , still fought with rival gangs , still got busted for burglaries and small-time dealing . Three years and thousands of hours with these guys , and Yanov couldn ’ t point to a single one who ’ d changed because of his efforts . He started law school , thinking he could help somehow through the judicial system . But he spent so much time on the streets that he couldn ’ t keep up his GPA . After a year , he was out . Four years , two failures . He needed time to think and a paying gig . A new job as a substitute teacher kept Yanov close to the youth he was trying to impact , and his students had never seen such a sub . He wore suits and spoke Spanish like a native ; he knew their slang and knew their lives .
Yanov watched 12- and 13-year-olds shuffle into his classroom — no backpacks , no notebooks , no homework . Yet the influence of gangs wasn ’ t so strong yet , either . His middle-schoolers acted hard , but they were wannabes , not yet fully entrenched in the life they saw for themselves .
One day , amid the empty coffee cups and dog-eared file folders in the teachers ’ lounge , Yanov realized preaching against gangs didn ’ t cut it . If that was what these kids thought would support them , he needed to offer them something better . Something that had their back more than the gangs they ’ d eventually come to rely on . Something that offered a real chance
Before winning $ 23,200 on Wheel of Fortune , Chris Yanov ( pictured above left ), started Reality Changers with

$ 300 to change the realities of their lives . On a takeout napkin , he wrote : “ Reality Changers .” Agentes de Cambio . It sounded even better in Spanish .

In a cinder-block room at the Iglesia , Yanov started Reality Changers as an afterschool mentor program comprised of four boys and four girls , eighth graders he recruited from his classes . Stick with this program all the way through high school , he told them , and he guaranteed they ’ d get into college with the scholarships they needed . He had no idea where those scholarships would come from , but he had four years to figure that out .
His job was to keep them coming every week — to keep them tuned in . He used his lifetime of game show fandom to his advantage , adopting a host persona and engaging students with a winning cadence and style . “ And no-o-w , all the way from Lemon Grove , Juan Gomez is going to tell us his answer . Let ’ s give Juan a bi-i-g hand !”
Yanov started Reality Changers with $ 300 dollars in his pocket . Then came that spin on the wheel . Yet even with that windfall , Yanov knew that fortune was fickle and there was no telling whether kids would stick with him .
28 TRITON | WINTER 2018