"Interrupting” gang membership is the goal of new Rainier Beach non-profits.
Sep 17, 2008, Vol: 15, No: 39
Coming of age has a very different meaning for 16-year-old Keenan Smith than it does for many Seattle teens.
On Jan. 11, one of Smith’s friends, 14-year-old De’Che Morrison, was found under a car in Rainier Valley after bleeding to death from a gunshot wound. Two weeks later, another friend, Perry Henderson, 18, was shot at a South Seattle party and later died in the hospital.
The killings, Smith says, made him realize just how short a future he had as a Rainier Beach gang member, so he quit the life and, in June, joined a program that’s helping him look a little farther down the road of possibility.
“I didn’t want to be a statistic, so I turned it around,” says Smith, a South Lake High School student who’s now working toward college.
The program he joined is called Youth 180, a Rainier Beach nonprofit formed in March in response to the violence. The faith-based program offers course study, mentoring and fun activities to participants like Smith, who in turn go out on the streets and talk to other youth about turning their lives around — the kind of outreach Mayor Greg Nickels says he wants to pay for in a citywide anti-gang initiative announced Sept. 10.
With Smith and other teen members of Youth 180 lined up behind him at a press event at the Garfield Teen Center, Nickels said he is budgeting $9 million over the next two years for a youth violence prevention program that will provide services and support to 800 middle-schoolers identified as having truancy or school problems, along with juvenile offenders who are returning.
The multi-agency effort calls for putting more police in middle schools, adding more late-night activities at community centers, and funding social-service and church programs that provide structure, opportunities and job training, with some programs to hire “violence interrupters,” such as ex-gang members who will work to curb gang activity on the street.
The goal, Nickels said Sept. 10, is to cut youth violence in half in the first year of the initiative.
“Whether it’s helping children to stay in school, to re-enter society or to deal with the anger, the agenda should be to intervene at a crucial time in that child’s life,” Nickels said. “No longer will we expect children to come to us. We will go to them.”
The services would start next May through networks being set up in three areas of the city, with the Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle to coordinate the Central District’s system, the Atlantic Street Center to handle Southeast Seattle, and Southwest Youth and Family Services to oversee the Southwest network.
Each organization will work out the details of which specific agencies in its area should offer what services to achieve a coordinated approach. To do that, Urban League director James Kelly is already working with the University of Washington to do “asset mapping” of services in the area, along with planning meetings to engage service providers and community members.
“There’s an old cliché that says, ‘Nothing beats a bullet better than a job.’ For these young middle- school students,” Kelly says, “I would say, ‘Nothing beats a bullet better than a community service project.”
Nickels will present a final plan this fall to the Seattle City Council, which may be faced with making cuts to fund the program: With the city facing a revenue shortfall, $5.5 million of the money that Nickels is asking for is new money that will have to come from somewhere.
The other $3.5 million already funds youth-related programs. So far, however, Youth 180 isn’t one of them. A summer-school type session that the group organized June 3 to Aug. 21, says service director Reggie Ball, was paid for by a matching neighborhood grant, with he and co-founder Gabriel Ladd hoping the program receives funding through the new initiative.
Others are taking a wait-and-see approach to observe what actually comes out of the program.
“I was actually impressed that the mayor is putting a significant amount of money into this,” says K.L. Shannon, an NAACP organizer. And “it’s great [the mayor] is starting at the age where kids get caught up in activities on the street, but what about the youth 15, 16 and 17 years old that are shooting and killing each other?” she asks.
“As they say, the devil’s in the details,” says Tim Burgess, public safety chair on the City Council. The mayor “has not spelled out how the $9 million will be spent or where it will come from,” he says. But, “I’m encouraged and eager to see the details.”
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