Santa Barbara Pro-Youth Coalition

Babatunde Folayemi, Director

Community Initiative to Reduce Gang Violence

Violence Prevention Implementation Plan

Executive Summary

BACKGROUND & NEED

The Santa Barbara Pro-Youth Coalition's violence prevention initiative will focus on reducing gang violence among the youth of South Santa Barbara County. Despite a stereotyped image of the region as wealthy and white, 37% of the general population and 58% of the children are of other ethnicities, primarily Latino, and the average income is 6.3% less than the state average. The last decade has seen the emergence of neighborhoods whose characteristics emulate those of more typically urban settings: heavily immigrant and minority, multinational and multilingual, and rental tenure rather than owner-based. This initiative will focus on four distinct communities which could be called the composite urban core of South Santa Barbara County: the lower east side of the city of Santa Barbara, the lower west side of Santa Barbara, the small coastal community of Carpinteria, and the downtown urban core of Goleta.

While its urban neighbors were experiencing a rising tide of gang violence, South Santa Barbara County remained largely unscathed by the effects of gangs and gang-related violence, until 1991. In fact, Santa Barbara had no gang-related homicides from 1980 to 1991. Gangs were not present on the school campuses, and expulsions were negligible. Over the last five years, however, South Santa Barbara County has experienced an explosion in gang-related violence. Gang-related arrests have increased by 466%, and gang members account for an astonishing 44% of all arrests for serious violent crime. School expulsions have soared by 253% and on-campus weapons possession has increased by 600%. Long-held neighborhood allegiances have now become violent territorial disputes between warring gangs. Today, there are 26 established gangs with 450 members in the city of Santa Barbara. The city has been carved in half by Eastside and Westside gangs defending their turf. Some students are so intimidated that they are afraid to ride the bus from one side of town to the other. In the city of Goleta there are two established gangs with 72 members, and in the city of Carpinteria, one gang with 53 members.

In response to this alarming trend, a county-wide study was conducted by the County Law Enforcement Chiefs (CLEC) and published as the Santa Barbara County Gang Strategy in 1993. In September 1993, interested members of the Fighting Back Task Force, a local collaborative focused on reducing the demand for drugs and alcohol, created a Gang Task Force to work on a plan to reduce gang violence in the Santa Barbara community. An initial, conceptual plan was developed by this group over the next six months and presented to the County Board of Supervisors, the Santa Barbara School Board, and the Santa Barbara City Council for conceptual approval. In February 1994, following the gang-related shooting death of a Westside man and a rising tide of youth violence, 800 people filled the pews of Our Lady of Sorrows Catholic Church for a town meeting on gang violence, convened by the Mayor. In May 1994, Fighting Back and members of its Gang Task Force met with the Santa Barbara Foundation to elicit the Foundation's support in convening a community-based coalition of agencies to continue to process and develop a violence prevention plan for the entire South Coast to the stage where it could be implemented. The Santa Barbara Foundation consequently awarded a $25,000 grant to Fighting Back in support of this project, and together with Fighting Back, convened the first meeting of the new Pro-Youth Coalition in November 1994. Subsequently, in May 1995, the Santa Barbara Foundation was notified that the Pro-Youth Coalition had been selected as one of twelve collaborative to be part of a national violence prevention initiative launched by the National Funding Collaborative on Violence Prevention, a coalition of private foundations.

This Implementation Plan represents the results of a 20-month community assessment and planning process, which included a survey of community resources, door to door surveys in the targeted neighborhoods, focus groups held with residents of housing complexes, neighborhood town meetings, two youth forums, and extensive planning meetings by coalition members, including youth and family service providers; and representatives from the religious community, juvenile justice system, schools, public health, recreation, city and county government, community residents, and youth.

The second activity is the expansion of a violence prevention curriculum to fourth and fifth grade classes not yet being served, and to all South Coast junior high schools. At elementary schools, the curriculum will be taught by a violence prevention specialist in collaboration with a team from law enforcement, probation, and the juvenile courts. The prevention specialist will deliver ten weeks of violence prevention education designed to reduce impulsive and aggressive behavior, including decision-making skills, tolerance, conflict resolution, and modeling and role playing of prosocial skills. An additional five weeks taught by juvenile justice personnel will address gang awareness and the consequences of gang involvement. At the junior high level, we will train teachers in the violence prevention curriculum, which can then be incorporated into existing courses, such as health education or social studies.

Individual Domain: The objectives of the activities in this domain are to increase the resiliency of at-risk youth toward gang recruitment by involving them in activities and relationships which provide guidance, increased self-esteem and positive self-identity; teach positive social and life skills, and provide positive role modeling and alternatives to the gang lifestyle. This component of the plan will organize mentoring activities for at-risk youth identified by the Neighborhood Outreach Workers. These activities will include both one-to-one and activity-focused group mentoring programs that provide academic, career, and social/recreational mentoring. Mentoring activities could also include recreational programs which provide a mentoring component, such as training soccer coaches to infuse self-esteem programming into their coaching. The Neighborhood Outreach Workers and Educational Advocates will assess the needs and interests of the youth they are serving and make recommendations about the types of activities that would be relevant. Programming for mentoring activities will be drawn from a collaborative of providers, including recreational agencies, youth agencies providing mentoring programs, businesses, and individuals interested in becoming mentors.

Youth Development

Approximately 25% of the Implementation Plan's resources will be invested in youth development strategies targeting youth aged 15 or older. The objectives of this component are to reduce the frequency and distribution of violence among gang-involved youth; involve ex-gang members in violence prevention activities; and assist youth who want to leave gangs by providing an opportunity for them to become part of the solution and develop self-esteem, social skills, leadership skills, and job readiness. The Pro-Youth Coalition recognizes how difficult it is for gang-involved youth to extricate themselves from the gang lifestyle. Former gang members face retribution, not only from their former adversaries, but from their own gang. It is extremely difficult to remain nonviolent in response to retribution of this nature. Despite the difficulty that these youth face, many have turned away from the gang lifestyle through the efforts of local church outreach workers, ex-gang members, or other caring adults. These former gang members represent a powerful force in deterring younger youth from joining gangs and/or assisting their peers in leaving the gang lifestyle. They understand the gang subculture, both its attractions and its price, and have chosen to reject a lifestyle of violence. Their voice is a powerful resource in the campaign to prevent youth violence.

Youth Collaborative: The Pro-Youth Coalition's primary youth development strategy is the formation of a Youth Collaborative which would be comprised of youth interested in becoming part of the solution to gang violence, including gang-involved youth who want to change their lifestyle as well as ex-gang members. Youth who are in the midst of extricating themselves from the gang lifestyle need to be in a supportive environment with prosocial peers who provide an alternative social structure to their gang. By involving them in a youth-run campaign to prevent youth violence, they are given an opportunity to forge new alliances with youth who have left the gang lifestyle behind, and to develop a new sense of identity as part of the solution.

Youth involved in the planning phase of the Pro-Youth Coalition came together from a variety of backgrounds. Some had left the gang lifestyle behind, others were still struggling with gang involvement. These youth were from different sides of town and opposing gang affiliations, coming together to look at ways to reduce the violence which they experienced as a daily reality in their lives and the lives of their friends. The strategies involved in the proposed Youth Collaborative are based on their input.

Coordination of Service Delivery

Several different agencies will be involved in the implementation of the various components of the plan, bringing a variety of skills and resources to the project. In order to coordinate service delivery across domains and components of the plan, we will establish an Interagency Service Delivery Team which will meet regularly for case review and the coordination of services to the targeted youth and families. Additionally, we will form domain-specific collaboratives, such as the collaborative of parent educators described in the Strengthening Families Program, to coordinate resources for each component of the plan.

Evaluation

The evaluation of this project will be conducted jointly by the cross-site evaluation team for the National Funding Collaborative on Violence Prevention and a local evaluator. The local evaluator for this project will be Dr. Cynthia Hudley, a professor at the Graduate School of Education at UCSB, whose research specialty is the social basis of peer directed aggression. She will evaluate the collaborative process evaluation and conduct an outcome evaluation for the Strengthening Families Program. The cross-site evaluation team, Cosmos Corporation, will conduct an evaluation of community outcomes and indicators, as well as an outcome evaluation for the Pre-Employment and Life Skills Training component.

Zona Seca's Role as Administrative Agency

On November 22, 1996, Mr. Charles Slosser, Executive Director of the Santa Barbara Foundation, wrote to Frank Bañales, Executive Director of Zona Seca, Inc., to confirm that Zona Seca had been chosen to be the administrative agency for the Coalition's Gang Violence Prevention Initiative, particularly in view of Zona Seca's "hands-on management style and passionate commitment to the issue of gang violence...." At the beginning of 1997, Zona Seca was proud to announce that Mr. Babatunde Folayemi had been selected for the position of Director of the Pro-Youth Coalition.
Updated * 14 March 1997
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