Testimony : ONE PERSON’S STORY ABOUT CURBING VIOLENCE : ‘Those Affected by Gangs Must Be Part of Solution’

Louis Negrete is chairman of Hope in Youth, a coalition of nine major religious denominations in the Los Angeles area that was formed to curb gang activity. Negrete is also a Chicano Studies professor at Cal State L.A.

The goal of Hope in Youth is to recreate democracy in L.A. First of all by knitting families together, reknitting a relationship between parents and children. And then establishing relationships between families in a neighborhood or a block and then bringing that group of families together with other groups, most of the time through their churches or congregations.

A month before the riots we announced our campaign to put together our project and that came from thousands of meetings with families who are deeply concerned over gang-related deaths that were increasing every year and are now projected to be at least 1,000 per year.

We connect parents who want more control over their own families and neighborhoods. We bring those families together to reduce gang violence. And we do it by building alternatives to a gang lifestyle. And so we try to figure out, on the basis of our conversations with these families, what could be done to empower them to rebuild their neighborhoods.

Our strategy consists of 160 family outreach teams made up of three professional workers, a youth worker, a parent educator and a school parent organizer. We now have 30 teams in the neighborhoods and we will have 50 in May. And when fully funded Hope in Youth will have a staff of 480--ranging in age from 22 to 65--and 8,000 trained congregational leaders.

The 8,000 trained volunteers are critical to the success of the program. What they have been doing is interviewing residents, local business leaders, service providers, church people and government workers to get to know them better, establish relationships with them and begin to introduce them to each other. We’ve already held over 12,000 of these one-on-one interviews.

The interviewee is identified by name and address and what their major concerns are. The next phase will be to form groups of these people to begin to attack those problems that most affect the quality of life in the neighborhood.

One of the things that I think has changed is that we have provided some hope. We have discovered that there are institutions that still work in the community and some of them are the churches and the synagogues, which are the most viable institutions in each community.

Our organizing principles are that, first, the people who are affected by problems must be part of the solution and, second, that the decisions must be made at the lowest possible level. That’s why it’s important for us to connect families with each other. We have an iron rule--never do for others what they can do for themselves. So we’re not service providers--we’re enablers toward empowerment.

We believe in a mix of people from different income levels, races, religions and backgrounds. And we have a firm belief in politics. Not just traditional electoral politics but a belief that people need to participate in decisions in their community, because we are convinced that the violence we see in society occurs when people can no longer participate in the public process of thinking and acting together.

One of the things we’ve discovered in the last couple of years is that there are some entrenched enemies in the bureaucracies of the city and the county who work very hard day and night to block community empowerment. And we have to very careful with these bureaucrats who try to pit us against other deserving entities in the city and county that need public funds. And at the same time we have to be careful because they will squelch any efforts on our part to obtain funding. They’ll sit on those funds unless we keep the pressure on.

One of the other things we’ve discovered was that we got very strong public support from law enforcement. Sheriff Sherman Block, the LAPD chief of police, Willie Williams and City Atty. Jimmy Hahn and D.A. Gil Garcetti are all our allies.

We collaborate with law enforcement because we believe in strong law enforcement in the community and that people are concerned about their safety.

One of the things we’ve encountered is that some people expect dramatic, immediate results; like we get funded and then--boom!--in six to seven months something dramatic happens to reduce violence. Ours is a five-year strategy. We can’t do what LAPD and the county government and the state haven’t been able to do overnight. But we think that we have a strategy in place so that after five years there will be a difference. But we’re beginning to see incremental differences in people. For example, people tell us this is the first time that anybody’s ever knocked on their door to ask what they think about politics in the city.

In a democracy, power to participate as equals in decision-making does not come as a gift, it comes from people determined to organize, to train, to struggle for justice and peace.

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Louis Negrete can be reached at (213) 343-2196.