Meeting Will Examine Youth Services Strategy : Gang diversion: Grass-roots proposal has four components: employment opportunities, after-school programs, family support and safety.

More than 1,500 people are expected to gather here this evening to urge the city’s mayor and school superintendent to approve a plan designed to reduce gang violence and provide work opportunities and after-school programs for the city’s young people.

The 7:30 p.m. meeting at St. Anne’s Catholic Church is a follow-up to a meeting that drew more than 1,000 churchgoers and residents--who are fed up with gangs and the lack of anti-drug and anti-gang programs--in December in an unprecedented show of grass-roots involvement.

Now, after five months of meetings, as well as research and analysis of programs across the country, members of the Orange County Congregation Community Organization have come up with a youth action plan that has the stamp of approval from 10,000 Santa Ana families and more than 800 teen-agers who filled out surveys.

The Youth Action Plan is divided into four areas: employment opportunities, after-school programs, family support, and safety.

It calls in part for a model apprenticeship program to be set up in a Santa Ana high school; a 400% expansion of the city’s summer job programs; staffing schools with more outreach workers and creating a Family Support Center to aid parents and teens involved with gangs and drugs; and an increase in community policing in three targeted areas.

“What we’re hoping to achieve from this meeting is that they listen to us and respond to our requests,” said Cecilia Maciel, a mother of four who lives near Center Street and McFadden Avenue and is a volunteer organizer for the group. “We’re not asking for the moon or the stars. We’re asking for something that is plausible, something very essential.”

The Orange County Congregation Community Organization boasts a membership of 50,000 families in Orange County--20,000 of them in Santa Ana. Members include congregants from five Santa Ana Catholic churches and 10 congregations of various denominations elsewhere in the county.

After the December meeting brought together 1,000 residents desperate to ease Santa Ana’s youth crisis, organizers got to work.

After a preliminary meeting with Mayor Daniel H. Young and Santa Ana Unified School District Supt. Rudy Castruita, volunteers knocked on doors and worked the phones, contacting hundreds of their neighbors for suggestions, said Maciel, who works through the Immaculate Heart of Mary parish.

“The majority of people wanted supervision more than anything, after-school programs or a homework center,” Maciel said.