The student combining theater and psychology to support homeless youth in the Bay Area
While the arts alone cannot solve homelessness, Northeastern student Rachel Oppong said they provide a place for people to be seen as more than their circumstances.
OAKLAND – Rachel Oppong, a Northeastern University student in her fifth year, has worked with children her entire life. The native of Worcester, Massachusetts, has been a babysitter, a camp counselor and, more recently, a worker at the Russell J. Call Children’s Center, a childcare space on Northeastern’s Boston campus.
But that passion for youth mentorship has always been matched by Oppong’s love for theater, behavioral psychology and social work, she said. Until she enrolled at Northeastern, she wondered whether she would find a way to align these seemingly disparate areas of interest into one, clear career path.
Luckily for Oppong, she found a roadmap for her future in Northeastern’s unique combined major of psychology and theater. She incorporated elements of her studies this summer during an internship at Larkin Street Youth, a nonprofit organization that provides for unhoused youth in San Francisco, where she was able to build on earlier experience she gained as a Northeastern co-op at Pine Street Inn, the largest homeless services provider in New England.
During the three-month Larkin Street assignment, she led theater workshops and acted as a guide for the youths, putting her psychology curriculum to use while working to uplift them through artistic expression, she said.
“The arts cannot solve homelessness,” Oppong said. “But they can provide something that is often missing from conversations about homelessness: a place for people to express themselves and be seen as more than their circumstances.”
Northeastern’s combined psychology and theater bachelor’s program equips students with an interdisciplinary foundation in cognition, psycholinguistics and the biological basis of behavior alongside a suite of theater courses and stage productions. Students leave the program with a deep understanding of how the two fields contribute to explaining human behavior in the domain of theater, according to Melinda Lopez, a Northeastern theater professor and award-winning playwright.
Before venturing to the Bay Area, Oppong had already found ways to combine social work with theater.
During her co-op at Pine Street Inn, she spent most of her days on the streets of Boston approaching unhoused people and connecting them with the provider’s network of helpful resources. She then served as assistant director for a Northeastern production of “Poor Clare,” a comedic drama that features homeless characters. It gave Oppong the chance to draw from her outreach experience and consult the actors on the best ways to play them with dignity and truth, Lopez said.
“A person without access to [Oppong’s] expertise might have made design choices that involved tattered clothes or a set design that showed extreme poverty,” Lopez said. “What [she] showed me is that folks who are living rough take great pains in how they speak, how they present.”
Oppong, having learned about San Francisco’s own issues with homelessness from her time visiting friends in the city, said her Northeastern curriculum and professional experiences inspired her to address them head-on. The problem seemed bigger than in Boston, she said, referring to San Francisco’s downtown Tenderloin neighborhood and its reputation for crime and drug use.
Homelessness in the city is seeing continued declines, according to data from the city’s 2026 Point-in-Time Count, a biennial census of people experiencing unsheltered and sheltered homelessness on a given day. Overall homelessness fell by 4% between 2024 and 2026, decreasing from 8,323 people in 2024 to 7,973 people in 2026. There has also been a 54% decrease in homelessness among children and transitional-age youth, who are between 18 and 24, according to the city.
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Still, the issue of youth homelessness remains an area in need of attention, according to Nicholas Hester, associate director of shelter programs at Larkin Street. Over the last year alone, the organization has worked with 185 transitional-age youths and 85 minors, supporting them with education resources, employment services, hot meals and more, he said.
But Larkin Street also provides arts programming that includes creative workshops, a recording studio and the option for youths to participate in professional performances. This excited Oppong, she said, because it felt like the first opportunity to combine all of her interests and point them in one direction.
Oppong helped the organization with various administrative tasks, such as reorganizing and relocating a large bulletin board of resource flyers and event notices. She assisted with rewriting the minor shelter’s program statement, updating the 150-page document with new policy information, emergency procedures, food menus and instruction manuals for staff, Hester said.
She also led theater groups, organized a musical theater karaoke night and supported the youngsters as they prepared original songs for their annual performing arts event, which was held at the iconic Strand Theater.
One youth composed and sang a song about her perseverance through past struggles with substance abuse, and another performed a rap song about his relationship with religion that included a moment in which a family member in the audience became part of their act.
The young people were not available to comment directly to Northeastern Global News due to Larkin Street’s privacy and confidentiality rules. But Oppong said their openness with her during the work experience left a lasting impact.
“I got to see people that were struggling, but I got to see past just the homelessness,” she said. “It was just so nice to see the creativity that they brought.”
Oppong said her time at Larkin Street cemented her desire to pursue youth social work as a career and to continue working with homeless people. Now back in Boston to complete her Northeastern studies, she is working part time at a domestic violence shelter while applying to graduate social work programs, some of them in California, she said.
“There’s something very beautiful about being able to meet people where they are, and the most heartwarming thing is seeing people persevere and move past the things that they’ve been struggling with,” Oppong said.
