Dozens of stylists, barbers turn up for Sonoma County teens at Santa Rosa event

Eleven-year-old Amy was about half way through her haircut Monday afternoon but paying little attention to what stylist Amanda Lee was doing with her blond locks. She was too busy working on a piece of yellow putty in her hand.

At one point she shaped it into a heart. Later, it was something else. But when Lee was finished cutting and unbuttoned the smock pinned at her client’s neck, Amy had molded her putty into a miniature hand. With it, she grinned and high fived Lee in thanks for her new look.

Across the hall, stylist OmarAntonio had just finished cutting and styling a teen’s long, black hair. Moments later, she came back smiling and interrupted a conversation to tell him she loved it.

“There is something very important about our responsibility as hairdressers to really read the client, to really see them,” he said. “I want to reintroduce my clients to themselves, so a good haircut is so important.”

These seemingly small moments — a smile into a hand held mirror, a flip of the ‘do, a handshake — were happening Monday across the donated space at Church Unstoppable. For three hours, about 60 stylists and barbers volunteered their time and skill to give free cuts and styles to an almost equal number of children and young adults from 10 to 25, all of whom have been touched by foster care or social service programs.

There were three DJs on stage. There were two live singers. Along one wall were tables lined up and loaded with brand new backpacks for the taking. At the entrance to the hall were hand-painted trucker hats created by Dom Chi Designs in Sebastopol, also for the taking. In yet another room was free food and drink. Throughout the three-hour event raffle prizes were given out: Apple headphones, Beats headphones, a JBL speaker, tickets to a Santa Rosa Growlers hockey game, Amazon gift cards, restaurant gift cards and jewelry.

It was all the brain child of KT Maggio, a barber at Daredevils & Queens Salon and Barbershop in Santa Rosa. And it was born of a seemingly simple ask.

It started with an annual holiday giving event held by nonprofit Our Village Closet, a group that runs a full-scale, foster care support operation out of thousands of square feet of space at St. Lutheran’s Church on Mendocino Avenue in Santa Rosa. Under the direction of executive director and co-founder Amanda Kitchens, foster care providers can pick up, for free, necessities for kids and young adults in their care, everything from strollers to socks to bathing suits and winter coats.

There are 1,000 individual kids or young adults registered with OVC, but the number of people who access their free services typically hovers around 5,000, Kitchens said.

Our Village Closet for the past five years has held a holiday giving program that has grown from 167 youth in 2021 to 769 kids this year. It was for that event that someone at OVC reached out to Maggio and asked if she could provide gift certificates for hair cuts.

Maggio said she would do one better. One a lot better.

She put out the call to the wider stylist and barber community in Sonoma County and asked for folks to show up for three hours on Monday, donate their time and skills, and send young adults back into the world looking sharp and feeling good.

“I didn’t even say much,” Maggio said of the invitation to her peers. “They just said ‘We’re in, we’re in, we’re in.’”

To say people rallied for the event would be underselling what unfolded Monday.

The top shelf cuts, the next level raffle prizes, the DJs, the food — it was a full-scale experience.

“I wanted them to feel special today,” Maggio said.

Barber Jesus “Chuy” Dominguez helped with perhaps the most obvious transformation Monday when a young man with sandy hair falling down to his shoulders sat down in Dominguez’s chair and said he wanted it all off.

“He asked for a five guard on top which is less than half an inch and then he wanted a rat tail in the back,” Dominguez said. “I always triple check when it’s a transformation that big but he was on it and I was like, ‘Alright, bro.’”

“He knew exactly what he wanted,” he said. “It was cool.”

And it was. After Dominquez tapped a stylist to braid the rat tail in the back, the young man cracked a small smile into the mirror.

“Things like this just fill my heart,” Maggio said, noting that Daredevils & Queens regularly supports haircuts for the homeless events and community outreach efforts. “I just wanted to come together and make these kids feel like number one.”

In addition to her colleagues at Daredevils & Queens, she tapped friends at Chuck’s Barbershop in Santa Rosa and Oak and Ivy Salon in Rohnert Park, who brought folks on Monday. She also tapped longtime friend Jose “JayTee” Tapia who, in addition to his 293,000 Instagram followers, runs the 15-chair Visionz Barbershop in Santa Rosa and, to Maggio’s way of thinking, is a star in the barbering world.

That would explain the small crowd of fellow barbers that gathered around Tapia when he pulled out his scissors and began to ply his craft on the dark locks of a young teenaged boy Monday.

“For men, for boys, it’s like our make up,” Tapia said of a haircut. “For me, being able to build confidence in a kid, there is nothing like it. People come to us before a first date, before a wedding, before any special day because a haircut alone can make anyone feel that much more special and that much more confident.”

That is what moved OVC’s Kitchens on Monday — the gift of confidence, the gift of being seen.

“It’s the fact that this many stylists and barbers showed up and showed up with heart,” she said. “It’s ‘You matter.’ Not necessarily you matter because of what happened to you but you matter just because of who you are…A haircut for so many of us, especially in this age group, it’s about how we show up in society. To be able to show up like everybody else and blend in is such a gift.”

Alexandra Montoya feels this.

Montoya is raising her 12-year-old granddaughter, Irie. Irie is bi-racial, her hair looks different from her grandmother’s, and that has made finding a stylist tricky. On Monday, Montoya was emotional about seeing her granddaughter pampered.

“Somebody needs to know her hair,” she said. “The truth is, I don’t.”

But the people who volunteered Monday did.

“This is wonderful, this makes a difference,” Montoya said. “It’s the mix of people. The cutters, the stylists, they volunteered their time. We understand what that means. They put heart into it.”

As stylist Natalie Dixon finished cutting Irie’s hair, they had a brief conversation. Irie decided she wanted her hair straightened on this day. Dixon got to work. Nearby, Montoya watched, deeply moved.

“All of these kids have lost someone, in one way or another,” she said. “That’s what makes what they are doing here a thing of beauty.”

You can reach Staff Columnist Kerry Benefield at 707-526-8671 or kerry.benefield@pressdemocrat.com. On Instagram @kerry.benefield.