CANOGA PARK : Teen-Age Girls Get Creative in Avoiding Gangs

It was bound to happen. Put a dozen teen-age girls in a crowded room with an unlimited supply of colored frosting and cake decorating tubes, and someone is sure to get frosting in the face, frosting in the hair, frosting down the shirt.

But although the lesson in cake decorating from Plusko’s Canoga Park Bakery at times threatened to dissolve into a food fight, discipline always managed to reassert itself. Monday night’s lesson was attended by participants in Creative Ladies, a new gang intervention program for teen-age girls.

“They are a boisterous bunch,” said Sandy Kievman, director of the Canoga Park-based Keep Youth Doing Something (KYDS), as the girls hushed each other and settled back to work after a particularly colorful frosting brawl.

Creative Ladies, an offshoot of the KYDS gang-intervention program, was started earlier this year by volunteer Donna Orcutt, a 26-year-old Valley College student who said she wanted to give the girls “a place to go to feel wanted.”

Orcutt said she didn’t start out thinking that the program should be just for young women. But the girls, who come from the heavily Latino neighborhoods and apartment buildings surrounding Lanark Park, wanted it that way, she said.

“When the guys come, they push us here, push us there--nothing we do is right,” explained 16-year-old Doris Carpio, a Chatsworth High School student and group member.

Kievman, who runs a co-ed sports league for area youth, said she had long been interested in starting a group just for girls.

“Girls in general have different issues,” she said. At KYDS softball tournaments, Kievman said she was sometimes bothered that the girls on the teams tended to “take a back seat” to the boys.

So far the focus of the group’s weekly meeting has been future plans; Orcutt has helped arrange for visitors to instruct the girls on going to college and on careers such as journalism, hair dressing and cake decorating. As the girls grow more at ease with each other, Kievman said she hopes to introduce other topics, such as pregnancy and violence.

“We try to concentrate on showing them what they could do with themselves,” Orcutt said. “It’s a give and take. It’s not like I’m there to teach them. It’s just to show someone really does care what they do with lives.”