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9
Street roots
Education * Dialogue * Independence
NATIONAL
MONEY, fro m page 8
gang unit supervisor Lt. Ron Wilson, lo have
juvenile probation officers ride along on
police patrols at some point
In all of this, critics say, grassroots
programs like Youth 180 have taken a
backseat in a top-down bureaucracy that’s,
already months late and will do nothing
more than what the city was already doing —
in some cases, less — with little input from
the community or young people on the
activities, programs and jobs they say they *
want.
,
“When I was a child, I spent my time at
the Parks Department,” says Yvonne
Newsom, an aide to Councilmember Richard
McIver and the mother of a teenage
daughter, both of whom voiced concerns at
a June 25 town hall meeting Jheld by council
members. “The parks had programs where
they took us camping; they signedus up for
arts and crafts, they taught us swimming.” |
“All that was free,” she says, “so while
we’ye spent money putting people in prison
- we always have money to send these kids
to jail — we’ve cut back all types of-programs
for recreation and now we’re asking what
are we supposed to do?”
x
More police, detractors say,, is not the
answer: The racial profiling and unjustified
stops, searches and-verbal abuse that many
African American teens say they have
• experienced, including ones in Ladd’s .
group, make them wary of officers.
“Putting police officers in schools is just
suppression,” says Liz Ali, who founded the
Mothers Outreach Movement after her son,
18-year-old Perry Henderson, was shot and
lolled at a party last year. “(It’s) not dealing
with the solution, it’sn o t giving the youth
.what they need.” Mentoring, she says, to .
gtfSg^change their lives.
W w-
The initiative will pay for 100 mentors.
| » Audios. (hrgctor,Maj?ikoXo.ckharf, who
joined the Office of Education in April, says
the school officers will play a similar role by
•
building relationships with students and
identifying those who might needmore
attention. “I would hate to call that
suppression,” Lockhart says.
. .Through the Parks Department, the
initiative is also paying for three community
centers and the Rainier Vista Boys & Girls
Club to offer extra programming andstay
open even later summer hours - most of
the night - to give teens a place to .go.
Lockhart, who formerly ran a New Jersey
nonprofit focused on dropout prevention,
1
say§ the program has also funded about 220
of the summer jobs that were offered this
year through the Human Services
Department’s Youth Employment Program.
But (or every gain, there’s been a loss -
and a delay.
Mayor Greg Nickels asked members of
Youth 180 to stand beside him when he
announced the initiative last September at
the Central District’s Garfield Teen Life
Center. But in the back and forth between
the mayor and City Council, which took until
April to finalize the plan, months went by
while the city worked out which department
was going to do what, says Ladd, delaying
the $25,000 grants that Youth 180 and two
other-groups hadbeen awarded by the \
• Department of Neighborhoods.
The three were originally awarded
$20,000 each last year under what had been
the Central District & Rainier Beach Youth
Initiative, which the Department of -
Neighborhoods started in 2007. Where that
initiative funded 22. communityprojects last
year, only three remain: Youth 180, another
mentoring program run by tiie Black-on-
Black Crime Prevention Coalition and Game
Recognize Camera program run by a ;
Central District group called Umoja Fest
.that explores various jobs within the sports
industry as models for success.
Five more programs have just gotten .
Neighborhood grants of $15,000 o f less,
Lockhart says, with about five more awards
to come, for a total of about 13 youth g
programs compared with last year’s 22.
The Central District’s lead agency, the
Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle, has
already hired three full-time and three part-
time outreach workers to talk to teens and
their families. But where there were 19 case
managers under an old city consortium of
programs called the Seattle Team for-Youth;*
thé new initiative will pay fo rll, with higher
average caseloads of 25 teens compared
with 15 before, city documents show.
’" .TSut t h e c ity ’s alread y had
management and., late-night summery _
programs, Ali says, and they don’t pull in
the kids who are killing each other. She’s
also worried there’s no programming at all
for young adults 18 to 24.
“My son was 18 when he was killed,” Ali
says. “What about the 18-year-old? Where
does he go? What program does he have?”
For 18-year-old Albert Pool, it’s a new job
that he’s just started as a childcare
specialist at the Rainier Vista Boys & Girls
Club, which is leading a consortium of
programs that will serve as the initiative’s
lead agency in Rainier Valley.
I Pool was 12 when he saw a close family
friend gunned down in the street in an
argument. That same year, he lost two
family members in an accident and a
shooting - tragedies, he says, that have
helped shape his fierceness and passion.
He’s now working to finish high schooLand
says he doesn’t see much value in what the
mayor is doing.
“I honestly feel they’re going about it the
wrong way. They’re going through a lot erf
corporate, from-the-outside-looking-intype
stuff,” Pool says. “It’s never going to work,
because the people that they’re trying to
affect are just going to -
be like, ‘they haven’t
been through what we
have,, they don’t know
"G angs d o n 't n ecessarily
what they’re talking
about’ — because they n eed to be c rim in a liz e d .
don’t.”
T h e y d o n 't n eed to be lo c k e d
“Instead of talking
u p . So m u ch m o n ey is b e in g
down and making
p u t in e v e ry s in g le y e a r lo r
everybody in the
situation look so
these g a n g p re v e n tio n s , b u t
negative and so
w e 're n o t r e a lly a t th e ro o t,
hopeless and pitiful,”
he says, “they need to w e 're n o t r e a lly ta lk in g
ab o u t w h a t's g o in g o n ."
realize that the main
power of change lies
- MON! TEP
CpMMOKMTJES AQAINST RAPE AhjD ABtlSE '
with the people” -
who are only going to
change, Pool says,
when they’re ready.
And if they’re not
ready to leave the friends they have in
gangs — the people they think of and rely oh
as family - it isn’t going to happen to make
some corporate type happy, he says.
“Gangs don’t necessarily need to be
criminalized. They don’t need to be locked
up,” says Moni Tep, a staff member with
Communities Against Rape and Abuse who
spoke June 2 at a City Hall forum that
Lockhart participated in on youth violence.
“So much money is being put in every
s in g le y e a r f o r th e s e g an g p re v e n tio n s b u t
we’re not really a t th e root, w e’r e n o t really
talking about what’s going on.”
“It’s not just about reaching out and
saying I’m going to help you here [or] give
you this,” says Tep, who lost two friends to
gun violence last year. “It’s about if nobody
else loves you, then I’m going to love you
because you’re a human being.”
In all the coalescing and coordinating of
services, “There will be adults who will say,
T love you,’” Lockhart says. “I think that
absolutely gdes to thè core of if — it’s really
about ‘Does someone care about me?’”
>
Reprinted from Real Change, Seattle, Wash.
& Street News Service: www.street-papers.org
Chicago youths find their voice
Group works to show the potential cast to the streets
BY BEN COOK
STREET N E W S SE RVIC E
CHICAGO, ILL.—
omeless youth gather once a month
at Chicago’s Lakeview Broadway
Youth Center to share their stories
with vocolo.org, a non-profit radio station
compiling their experiences to make this
invisible population’s struggles known.
“There’s an unfortunate saying in the
media: ‘If it bleeds, it ledes,”’ said Anne
Holcomb, organizer of the homeless-youth
activism group HELLO, to a room of 24
youths, referring to the tendency of bad
news to grab more headlines than good
news. For the past five years ^sh§ s
|
HELLO (Homeless Experts Living Life’s
Obstacles), and in the face of severe* budget
cuts she yvants people to know that we
bleed. We have blood in our veins. Crap
happens out on the street. Life is hard, and
we need the government and the public to
pay more attention.”
HELLO is the longest continuously J
organized homeless youths activism group
■
in the country; some of the older youths in
the group have been with it almost since
the beginning. It’s also at the mercy of
Chicago’s lean 2009 social-services budget.
The point of HELLO is to educate the
public, policy makers, and the media about
the needs of homeless youths; to givejhe
young adults in the group opportunities to
become active citizens* to gain self-esteem
and self-mastery, to respond to social and
policy issues that impact them, to be heard
and to learn life skills.
Co-sponsored by The Night Ministry and-
The Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, a
total of 123 youth ages 14 to 25 participated
actively in the HELLO during the last fiscal
year (2008). Weekly Tuesday meeting
attendance averages around 15-30 youth.
Beth Cunningham, a lawyer with the
Chicago; Coalition, also provides essential
support and professional resources.
Holcomb, formerly a homeless youths
herself, discussed why she formed the
See YOUTHS, page 10
A homeless youth.
|g g
t e iw
ChlcaS°-
P H O T O C O U R T E S Y O F STREET W IS E IN C H IC A G O , ILL .