Lowell Sun: UTEC Welcomes Founding Member as Board Chair

July 18, 2025, The Lowell Sun

LOWELL — Violence prevention nonprofit UTEC is welcoming one of its original founding young adults to serve as chair of the organization’s board of directors amid a renewed search for a new CEO.

When Marianela Vasquez was a junior at Lowell High School in the late 1990s, she had been working part time in the city’s Streetworker program at a time of intensifying gang violence within the city. After one night in which there were multiple homicides in Lowell, Vasquez and other youth and young adults decided more needed to be done.

“The one sort of common theme was that nobody wants to be out here doing this, but we don’t have a space to go that is safe,” Vazquez said in a video call Wednesday.

That space would come together in the form of the United Teen Equality Center, now simply known as UTEC, with a facility established in 2006 in the former St. Paul’s United Methodist Church building at 35 Warren St. Since UTEC’s founding in 1999, it has served the Merrimack Valley through various programs aimed at curbing street violence. Those include its Street Outreach and Violence Intervention program aimed at meeting at-risk young adults “where they are at” and peacemaking between gangs.