Youth Center Serves a Multiethnic Mix

Tucked inside the First Church of the Nazarene with no indication of its presence outside, the P. F. Bresee Foundation’s youth center is a bit hard to locate, but each day after school dozens of youngsters find a little of everything there.

“People tell us we’re one of the best-kept secrets in the city,” said Jeff Carr, director of the foundation’s youth services division, which was established in 1987. But among young people, the secret is out. Last year, Carr said, about 600 youths, 8 to 21 years old, made more than 8,000 visits to the youth center in the church at 3401 W. 3rd St. The number of visitors could nearly double this year, he said.

The multiethnic mix of youths comes from the neighborhood and as far away as Watts and South-Central, often catching rides back and forth in one of the center’s vans.

Word-of-mouth draws many visitors, but youngsters are also referred to the center by community agencies, police and their schools--including Weemes Elementary, Foshay and Virgil junior high schools and Belmont High School.

Drawing from so many neighborhoods, the center brings together youths who might otherwise consider themselves rivals.

“We’re trying to offer kids an alternative to the streets and gangs,” Carr said. “Kids don’t have many places where they can feel safe. This is neutral territory.”

Carlos Rosas, 16, a regular visitor, agrees. “Inside (the center) it’s a different thing. It’s not the color of your skin or what gang you’re from. In here you’re equal. There aren’t any other places around like this.”

For the most part, youths who use the center get along fine, said Cathy Trout, a teacher in the center’s computer lab, which is equipped with 11 Macintosh computers, printers and a video player purchased with grant money.

In addition to the computer lab, where students can learn word processing and desktop publishing at their own pace, tutors are available to help with homework and improving reading skills.

Some youths, such as Michelle Taylor, 14, and Cheryl Bookman, 16, also pitch in to tutor their peers in spelling, reading or math. “It’s good to know you can help somebody,” said Taylor, who thinks she might like to be a teacher someday.

Downstairs in the gym, boys and girls play basketball, practicing for youth league games. Upstairs, video games whir, zing and hum in a symphony conducted by competing maestros.

If, in the course of all that activity, someone gets the munchies, a youth-run snack bar offers chips, burritos, pizza, ice cream and soda. “We want to recycle youth dollars here to provide more youth services,” Carr said of the snack bar. Youth-run desktop publishing and a silk screening business are also in the works, he said.

Rosas is among five young people selected to run the snack bar after school. They earn $4.50 an hour while making a profit of $35 to $50 a week for the center, which has an annual budget of about $300,000 raised from grants and donations.

Carr said the profit from the snack bar is used to subsidize awards of food and other incentives for educational achievements.

“See, the kids know that if they buy stuff here they’re not wasting their money,” Rosas said. “The money comes back to them.” He added that through the job, his first, he has learned about taking inventory, keeping books, and developing customer service and other aspects of running a business.

The youth center’s full-time staff of six also organizes religious activities, said Carr, a Nazarene minister. “Some kids have a real spiritual hunger,” he said. “Churches these days are not meeting their needs and are not relevant to young people.”

But the staff doesn’t push religion and it’s not the primary draw for most youths.

“It’s like getting away from L.A. for a little while,” Rosas said. “You can get more attention here than you can at school and you can be yourself; you don’t have to prove nothing.

“Plus, throw in the video games, the computers and the girls, and it sounds pretty good,” he said with a grin.