As Director of Programs for Latin America and the Caribbean I recently participated in a visit to Los Angeles, California to take a look at their programs in crime prevention and youth development, particularly those funded and supported by the Gang Reduction and Youth Development (GRYD) Office. In October 2012, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the City of Los Angeles formalized a partnership to improve regional security and reduce gang violence in the Western Hemisphere. As part of the agreement, the City of L.A agreed to 1) Serve as an advisor on USAID’s citizen security programming for the region; 2) Share best practices and technical knowledge with USAID staff and regional program implementers; 3) Collaborate on specific at-risk youth initiatives; and 4) Assist with city-to-city partnerships and best practices.[1] The partnership builds upon the U.S. Government’s Central American Regional Security Initiative (CARSI).

ICMA has been implementing programs focused on municipal-led violence prevention in Central America since 2009 and in Mexico since 2010. With the signing of the MOU between Los Angeles and USAID, ICMA has been in touch with Los Angeles to work on a strategy to incorporate its gang reduction and youth development strategy (coordinated through its GRYD Office under the leadership of Deputy Mayor Guillermo Cespedes) into our programs, particularly our regional program, AMUPREV (Municipal Partnerships for Violence Prevention in Central America). The GRYD Office was established in 2007 as part of an intensive effort on the part of the city of LA to foster youth development and reduce the influence of street gangs in the lives of youth. GRYD uses a neighborhood-based approach that focuses on high-gang crime areas and implements prevention, intervention, re-entry and suppression programs to address the prevalence of gangs and related crime in those communities.  GRYD identified 12 zones in LA which were most affected by gang violence which account for 16.6% of LA City’s population and 30% of all gang crime. The GRYD Model serves community residents, youth at high risk for joining gangs (10-15 year old) and young people (14-24 yrs. old) who live in the 12 GRYD zones, attend a school that serves the GRYD Zone and/or spend a majority of their time in the social network of the GRYD zone. Each GRYD Zone has a contracted prevention provider, a contracted intervention agency, a dedicated law enforcement component and an assigned GRYD staff member. [2]

I traveled with three USAID personnel and the director of a USAID-funded project in Honduras and we visited several sites which have received support from GRYD, many of which are already well-established NGOs working to serve youth-at-risk.  One of the locations we visited is Homeboy Industries  - the largest gang intervention, re-hab and re-entry program in the United States. Homeboy Industries is an organization which provides each year over 300 men and women – mostly former and current gang members - with job training, jobs, counseling and emergency assistance. Their mission is “to provide our clients at Homeboy a supportive community, a sense of family and a place where they come to help find their strengths, learn job skills, get an education, learn new life skills, and become contributing members to their families and communities.”[3] Father Gregory Boyle is a Jesuit Priest and Founder and Executive Director of Homeboy Industries. He is the author of the New York Times Bestselling book, “Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion.”

What is unique about Homeboy Industries is that they hire and work with gang members, including those that are of rival gangs. They help prepare the kids for working outside of the industries run by Homeboy and make the connections in the marketplace for the kids who have gone through their 18-month program so they can get jobs. The person who gave us the tour of Homeboy Industries is a great example of someone who has gone through the program. His path in life has been like nothing I can imagine and yet so similar to many of the struggles of other youth-at-risk -a mother abused by her husband;  frustration at not being able to help her and at her for letting herself be beaten; lack of guidance and struggles in school; drugs; gangs; rehabilitation; relapse, etc. Like him, these kids who are referred to as “youth-at-risk” face situations that kids should not have to deal with when growing up and which basically lead to a loss of their childhood – with consequences for the rest of their lives. The man who gave us the tour was in his early 40s and he was just happy to be alive at that age. I met a young man who was 32 years old in Watts who works as a crisis intervention worker, who said the same thing to me. How many of us can state as one of our biggest accomplishments at any age just to be alive?

I visited a lot of programs that get funding from GRYD on the trip. What’s impressive about all of them, aside from the incredibly dedicated staff,  is how comprehensive they are.  The programs link youth and families with a broad range of services, engaging them in constructive activities like educational and recreational programs; connecting them with positive social supports such as mental health services or parenting support groups; and empowering them as agents of change. The approach is really in line with what ICMA has been promoting with its municipal-led crime and violence prevention programs, fostering the creation of committees within municipalities which bring together on a permanent basis municipal and national government representatives, non-profit associations (church and youth groups, community-based organizations), the private sector, and police representatives, among others, to help plan, prioritize and coordinate prevention activities. A couple of things have become very clear from our work in crime prevention and were confirmed by this trip (and others before it to cities we have partnered with in the US). First, it’s really not enough to just deal with the individual, you have to develop programs that address the needs of the individual’s peer group, family and neighborhood. And second, the local government plays a key role as facilitator, promoter, coordinator and sometimes funder of these initiatives and programs. 

What I also learned on the trip and from LA is that you can’t really separate prevention from intervention. We can’t just work with the kids that are at risk of being influenced to join gangs, we have to work with the gang members themselves, many of whom are looking for an opportunity to get out. The GRYD’s crisis intervention workers (CIWs) are a critical piece of the puzzle - they respond to gang-related incidents and calm the situation down, decreasing the potential for retaliation. They improve the relationships between the community and law enforcement and assist with Safe Passages (safe routes for community members to travel to/from school/work). They mentor troubled youth and families, provide referrals and job assistance for re-entry programs and help identify gang members who are interested in changing the trajectory of their lives. I also met a  number of these CIWs on my trip and I am inspired by their courage, their perseverance and their compassion. To get a sense of what they do and the frustrations that they encounter along the way watch the documentary, “The Interrupters” about violence interrupters in Chicago.

One final note that I think encapsulates the world that these kids are living in. I had the chance to participate in an interactive session with around 24, 11-15-yr old kids. They passed around a genie bottle and were asked to identify the one thing that they really wanted in life – their one wish – with no restrictions. Then we were all given an imaginary amount of money and we bid, auction style, on the wishes. We could bid on our own wish or on some else’s.  It was an interesting and telling exercise as many of the kids had no idea what they should wish for. It took many of them a long time to figure out what their wish was. One girl refused to say. I don’t think it was because they had too many to choose from. The ability to dream and think outside of their reality has been affected by what they experience daily. I feel pretty inadequate in the face of this kind of challenge and in the light of all of these educators, crisis intervention workers and case managers who dedicate their lives to helping these kids learn to dream, but the one thing I can do and what my position at ICMA allows me to do is provide opportunities to share their lessons-learned and their methodologies with their counterparts in Latin America and the Caribbean so that the kids in the municipalities we work with can benefit from them and also learn to dream.