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About The skanner. (Portland, Or.) 1975-2014 | View Entire Issue (Aug. 29, 2018)
August 29, 2018 The Skanner Page 3 News cont’d from pg 1 cific American Network of Oregon. Pham sees a range of potential jobs the fund could create, including solar panel installation, insulation upgrades, sustainable food production and oth- er jobs that would help Portlanders use energy more sustainably and adapt to climate change. “ We’re building a force, kind of a brown- green coa- lition The fund taxes retail- ers with total annual rev- enue over $1 billion and Portland annual revenue over $500,000 to fund clean energy projects such as renewable en- ergy; heating, lighting, water and cooling effi- ciencies; green building design and tree canopy. One-quarter of the fund should be used for jobs training for communi- ties of color, women, peo- ple with disabilities and Reform people who are chron- ically underemployed. The fund is modeled on the Portland Chil- dren’s Levy, Pham said, and there would be a nine-member committee to review grant applica- tions. The Portland Chil- dren’s Levy, created in 2002 by retiring Portland City Commissioner Dan Saltzman, is a $10 million a year fund that provides grants to nonprofits for services such as child- abuse prevention, early childhood education, after-school mentoring and family hunger relief. This petition is the cul- mination of a two-and- a-half year process that began when the NAACP approached APANO about building a coali- tion to include people of color in the green econ- omy. “We’re building a force, kind of a brown- green coalition,” Pham said. “This is really about finding new ways to re-power Portland but also a way to build polit- ical power as groups that are not seen as tradition- al stakeholders.” cont’d from pg 1 les, the GRYD program. What does the program do and what was your role there? Guillermo Cespedes: The Los Angeles Gang Reduction and Youth Development office was put together in 2007. It is the only office of its kind in the United States that has a municipal budget, to address the gang violence problem using what some people referred to as the public health approach; in other words out of that budget, we did not pay the police, it was just for social pro- grams and stuff like that. And the mayor brought me in to develop the strategy. TSN: In the GRYD pro- gram, juveniles are sort- ed into different levels of risk. Can you describe how it works? GC: I developed a strat- egy for the city that we used to refer to as the four-legged table. Which meant that in each tar- get community there were some primary pre- vention projects, some secondary prevention projects, some tertia- ry prevention projects, and blended with that, law-enforcement. And those are the legs that constitute the table. Overall the four- legged table in LA was comprised of about 16 different components, and we were pretty in- novative and pretty suc- cessful – we’re going on nine consecutive years of seven indicators of gang violence including homicides, having been reduced significantly. (Homicides decreased by 20 percent, driven large- ly by a decline in gang-re- lated deaths.) Prior to that, we thought that youth at risk in every community were the same, and they got the same “medicine,” and the same interven- tions and all of that. So L.A. shifted a little bit away from the conven- tional narrative of those days that said -- poverty and unemployment and poor education and all of those things would cre- ate a gang member. We worked with some of the top researchers in the world to commission the Youth Service Eli- gibility Tool, which has now become a key com- ponent to the work in Central America for Pro- ponte Mas and in the Ca- ribbean as well. It is a tool that basically identifies scientifically three levels of risk: the youth that are at the primary level of risk, the youth that are at a secondary level of risk, and the youth that are at a tertiary level of risk. And all of those things supposedly should help us then apply an ap- proach, or a “medicine,” that is aligned with that level of risk. John Goodwin Joins the Portland Art Museum Earlier this month the Portland Art Museum announced John Goodwin as the new major gifts officer. Goodwin joins the senior leadership team and takes on a role pivotal to the future of the museum and region’s arts community. Goodwin will help spearhead fundraising for the Rothko Pavilion and associated renovations designed to make the 126-year-old museum more accessible to the public. To date, donors have contributed nearly $33 million for the capital project. Goodwin comes to the Museum after working six years for the Portland Trail Blazers -- most recently as senior premium services manager. His previous employment also includes the University Club of Portland and the Benson Hotel. Goodwin served as an Associate Director of the Center Art Gallery in Honolulu. Shortly after moving to Portland in 1994, he became a volunteer docent at the Portland Art Museum. Goodwin joined the Museum’s Board of Trustees in 2015. He also serves on the board of the Oregon Cultural Trust and is a former board member for Disjecta. Goodwin stepped into his role Aug. 13. Grant PHOTO COURTESY OF PORTLAND ART MUSEUM Energy cont’d from pg 1 said in the release. “This grant recognizes the success of their model and how its innovative ap- proach has earned support for its expansion to help even more Portlanders.” SEI — working with several partnering organizations — will receive $5.6 million per year to provide additional services to low-income youth, expanding its focus from schools inner north- east Portland to the Reynolds School District. According to SEI founder and CEO Tony Hopson, the organization will partner with Albina Head Start, Metro- politan Family Services, NAYA, IRCO, Latino Network and the United Way to deliver services. The Promise Neighborhood Grant will allow Self Enhance- ment Inc. to serve more than 7,000 students and their families in some of Portland’s most un- derserved and under-resourced communities, through the Albi- na-Rockwood Promise Neighbor- Guillermo Cespedes That is what Proponte Mas is doing in Hondu- ras and El Salvador; and St. Lucia, Guyana and Saint Kitts in the English speaking Caribbean. TSN: What are the three levels of risk? GC: Primary level is the youth in poor com- munities who will ben- efit from school and job development programs. Secondary level is the youth in those commu- nities who is closest to the door -- he hasn’t fully absorbed the identity of gangs, he is flirting with hood Initiative. Hopson told The Skanner the grant will enable SEI to expand the whole-school model it cur- rently employs to schools in East Portland. That model is responsi- “ The grant will enable SEI to ex- pand the whole- school model it currently em- ploys to schools in East Portland ble, he said, for improving Jeffer- son’s graduation rates in recent years. “When kids are failing and not doing well, oftentimes it’s not to do with what’s going on in school,” he said. The whole school model provides year-round support to families of color and low-income families. The Reynolds School that identity, he is very close to it. He is close to that door, but he hasn’t yet fully committed to that identity. That youth requires an individual- ized plan to prevent him from choosing that door. And tertiary level is the youth who has already crossed into that world, we don’t know how deep- ly embedded he is in that identity. We may not know when he actually joined, we don’t know how committed he is, and we may not know the types of activities that he may or may not be in- volved in. But he does or she does identify them- selves as a gang member. So those are the three levels. We use a medical analogy: Primary level, the treatment is diet and exercise; secondary lev- el, it’s diet and exercise plus medication; and ter- tiary level is a bit more invasive medical care. To create these risk District, situated in a part of the Portland area that has rapidly become more diverse at the same time Northeast Portland has be- come more gentrified, doesn’t have as strong a track record of serving children of color, though they participate in the Schools Uniting Neighborhoods program and saw the need for expanded services, he added. “They realized they couldn’t get the job done themselves and we realized we couldn’t get the job done by ourselves,” Hopson said. “We believe this is a model that could impact graduation rates around this entire state,” Hopson said. Hopson established SEI in 1981 as a one-week summer basket- ball camp for African American teens. By 1989 the nonprofit had grown into a year-round program providing academic support and wraparound services for Afri- can American students and their families. levels, L.A. looked at fac- tors like gang-related vi- olence; how many youth are in foster care in the schools. In other words, we supported kids from families historically im- pacted by low levels of unemployment, high lev- els of poverty, and all the social ills that we histori- cally think of as creating violence. The majority of youth of all high-risk communities -- including Honduras -- are at prima- ry risk. TSN: What do you think is the most import- ant things people should know about gangs and how to stop gang vio- lence? GC: I think when peo- ple talk about best prac- tices, I think what’s prov- en to be most effective requires a changing lens in the way that we look at the problem. And I think that change has to be from the lens of under- standing the function of group identity for a gang. In other words, looking at gangs more broadly than just criminality. They serve a function. We may not like and cer- tainly don’t approve of all the things that gangs do, but it has been prov- en that looking at them just through a criminal lens leads to arrests, it leads to oppression, and it leads to the idea that we can eliminate gangs – and I’m not sure that we will. LA is an interesting ex- ample because, well — it has more gang members and less violence. So that kind of puzzles people, but I think that chang- ing paradigm in LA has basically decriminalized being a gang member. It is not against the law to be a gang member. It is against the law to com- mit crimes, but it is not against the law to be a gang member.
