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.
