They might fight at school or in the streets. But when they form a circle on bean-bag chairs twice a week, these tough girls are able to talk passionately about teenage problems.

Nobody at Hope Springs Wellness Center expects them to deny their connection to gangs — or the reality of conflict between their gangs.

But the girls in this small peer support group do have a routine to follow. They gather upstairs at Hope Springs in the kitchen for a healthy snack after school, tackle a deep topic together, then get busy with an artistic project.

This is a place where they’re supposed to tell it like it is.

So when they make collages about what makes them feel safe, they push aside pictures of houses and flowers in frilly magazines. Instead, they depict gang symbols, gang colors and knives.

“We were a little taken back,” said Beth Nichols, a licensed social worker, recalling that particular art project. “And they said, ‘This is our safety, this is how we stay safe.’ ”

Hope Springs, an outpatient-counseling program that opened last October, didn’t set out to be a place that works with gang kids — and its mission is much broader. Teenagers who need clinical help for substance abuse, mental-health issues, domestic violence, trauma, anger management, grief and crisis management are referred here from a variety of agencies. Sometimes parents contact Hope Springs directly.

“It (gangs) comes up, but it’s not the work that we’re doing,” Nichols emphasized.

Peer groups are crucial to the philosophy of Hope Springs. A separate group for teenage boys with substance-abuse problems meets three times a week.

Hope Springs is forging a new model of treat-ment for troubled teens — one that goes beyond the 50-minute therapy session and gives special attention to gender. The ambition is to build a community where young adults can drop in years after their treatment is over, if they have a crisis or just want to share something.

“It was important for us to create a center where any teen within the Santa Fe area can come and work out issues, regardless of socioeconomic background,” said Melody Bolen, co-founder of the center. “The teens share similar issues and pressures in their lives, and Hope Springs can be a place for them to have community and get support from each other and staff.”

Nicole’s story

“Nicole,” a lanky, withdrawn 15-year-old, never planned to stay long at the center on Hopewell Street, which occupies a former dance studio and is carefully decorated like a well-kept home. She’d been to various counseling programs before, refused to open up and always walked away unchanged.

After getting into trouble at Santa Fe High School last year for truancy and fighting, her juvenile probation officer ordered her in March to therapy at Hope Springs.

She was angry when she got there. “I’m going to do a couple of times and I’m not coming back,” she forewarned her grandparents.

Nicole has plenty to brood over. Her father didn’t want to settle down with a family and her mother sank into a severe depression she couldn’t shake. When Nicole was 3, her 19-year-old mother committed suicide, saying before she died that she felt she couldn’t give her daughter a good life. The revolver she used had been hidden between the mattresses in Nicole’s grandparents’ bedroom for 10 years.

When people ask how her mother died, Nicole avoids answering the question.

Her grandparents, Gina and Juan Lujan, stepped in and raised her. Grandma worked in medical offices, and grandpa is a disabled Vietnam veteran.

After their daughter died, they drank hard for a while, then pulled closer together as a couple and moved on.

They realized Nicole was struggling with the loss of her mother, but no matter where they took her for help, she never felt comfortable and she wouldn’t talk.

Like her mother and her uncle before her, Nicole was drawn to gangs. The attraction began when she was about 8 years old, her grandmother said, but she didn’t recognize the connection until Nicole was at Alameda Middle School.

Middle school — that’s where Gina Lujan “lost them all,” she said of her kids and grandkids.

“For a lot of these kids, the gang affiliation is generational,” said Bolen, a licensed marriage and family therapist at Hope Springs. “And different parents and siblings from different generations have belonged to different gangs.”

Boys and girls face different problems

The founders of Hope Springs — Melody Bolen and Beth Nichols — used to work together at Esperanza Shelter for Battered Families. They have a strong belief that boys and girls should be in separate counseling groups so they can discuss touchy subjects such as abuse and relationships.

When envisioning what Hope Springs should be, they looked for gaps in services. Gender-sensitive options for teenage girls were scarce, as borne out by the American Civil Liberties Union’s threatened lawsuit against the Children, Youth and Families Department, which was settled in 2006. Among other things, the agreement mandated the closure of the New Mexico Boys School in Springer as well as comparable access to services for females and males.

Bolen and Nichols knew of effective residential-treatment centers and in-home programs in the state, but they wanted to create something that would address teenage pressures in the context of Santa Fe’s community.

“We see so much potential and so many strengths in these amazing teens,” Nichols said, “and our goal at Hope Springs is to support them to see this for themselves.”

Today, Hope Springs, a for-profit organization, strives to be a place of connection for teenagers with a variety of social, behavioral and family problems.

For many of the displaced teens, gangs are their family, their support system, their identification. Hope Springs wants to create a network of resources, that in time, will replace the role of gangs in their lives.

“We’ve had some intense moments,” Nichols said. “But if you have an unnatural environment where these kids aren’t allowed to work out these issues, how can you expect them to go back out on the streets and not have that issue?”

Nichols said the peer groups give teenagers an opportunity to understand themselves better, while following some ground rules.

“OK, we understand that right now this is part of your culture — this gang thing. And we’re going to talk about that and we’re going to look at that. But in the meantime, you need to figure out how to come in here and not have that be an issue. And then you have to figure out how to go out there and not have it be an issue,” Nichols said in summing up the rules.

After a Fourth of July fight, which was not gang related, two girls faced each other in the group. The counselors pulled them into separate corners of the room and challenged them to work it out “because they have to live in this community together.”

They did.

Healing a whole family

For six months, Nicole has been coming to Hope Springs for private counseling, family counseling and after-school group sessions.

While her grandmother and her cousin, 8-year-old Charmaine Lujan, attest to the changes they’ve seen in Nicole, only Nicole can explain why she’s responding to this program.

“The workers, they make it easier for you,” Nicole said. “They’re there for you and stuff.”

That afternoon she made a self-portrait out of blue, orange, white and pink Play-Doh in a session with two other girls.

Out of earshot from her counselors and nibbling on an apple, Nicole said she’d recommend the program to others.

“This is the best thing that ever happened to our family,” she said.

Before Nicole left the room, she flashed a big smile.

Her grandmother’s enthusiasm about Hope Springs is equally strong. “I think they’ve brought a lot of peace,” Lujan said.

And she wants to help. Lujan is spreading the word about a new support group for families who feel overwhelmed and want to talk.

“I keep myself going by getting involved in programs like this,” Lujan said. “I want to be a big part of Hope Springs.”

A grim cycle

Gina Lujan came from a family steeped in trauma.

At age 19, Lujan, a single parent at the time, became a foster parent to her sister’s four children. Her sister overdosed on drugs intentionally during Fiesta weekend.

Between 1971 and 2004, Lujan lost two sisters, a brother, a son and a daughter.

Drugs, alcohol abuse, suicide. She has done what she can to stop the cycle. Over the years, she started suicide-prevention groups and lobbied lawmakers for gun-safety laws. She has spent time on her knees at her household altar, praying.

“I stood up and fought back. I want to save someone else’s life,” Lujan, 55, said.

Her one surviving child has an alcohol problem, and he has been in and out of prison. She helped raise her grandson, Matthew Cordova, until age 13 when he left home against her wishes.

Last year, he was convicted of shooting another teenager in the thigh at Santa Fe Place; at one point, a judge considered having him tried as an adult. Matthew, then 16, actually hoped to be sent to the state penitentiary, so people would know him and look up to him, his grandmother said.

Instead, Matthew went to the Santa Fe juvenile detention center, where he has worked toward a high-school equivalency degree. He tells his grandmother he wants to be a fitness instructor.

Later this month, he’ll move home with Gina and Juan Lujan on West San Francisco Street, an area where they say gangs were particularly strong in the 1980s and 1990s.

Nicole is looking forward to Matthew’s release. They were raised together and called each other “brother” and “sister.”

Lujan hopes Matthew will go to Hope Springs, too, and it might become a place of healing for all of them.

“He’s really changed his life,” she said.

Counselors making commitments

The Lujans used to have trouble getting Nicole to stay home. She’d disappear for days at a time.

Gina Lujan was impressed when one of the counselors at Hope Springs offered to help find Nicole should she run away again — and to prove her sincerity, the counselor even gave out her cell-phone number. Little things like that made Gina Lujan realize the staff members weren’t just “clockwatchers.”

Because of what they’ve learned in therapy sessions at Hope Springs, she and her husband have initiated family nights. Even Nicole’s cousin was surprised when Nicole chose to go to dinner with them rather than take off with her friends.

“Her attitude has changed,” Charmaine said. “It’s amazing.”

Charmaine, 8, is happy to get attention from Nicole for a change.

Though still on probation, Nicole now follows curfew, shuns drugs, eats healthful foods, talks to the family and has developed a positive attitude about life, her grandmother said. She writes poetry. And she’s back in school.

“This program has done wonders,” her grandmother said.

Contact Diana Del Mauro at 986-3066 or dianadm@sfnewmexican.com.

• An outpatient program for 13- to 17-year-olds in need of counseling for substance abuse, mental-health problems, domestic violence, community violence, depression, trauma and abuse, anger management, grief and crisis management
• A peer support group for boys with substance-abuse problems; meets three days a week after school for three hours
• A peer support group for girls with a variety of needs;meets two days a week after school for two hours
• Individual therapy, group therapy, family therapy, case management and aftercare services
• A family support group that meets at 4 p.m. Wednesdays.
• Payment is accepted through Medicaid, private insurance and cash on a sliding scale according to family income.
• For more information, call 992-8900.