Art, Politics Mesh in Teen Anti-Violence Plan : Crime: New grants help teach gang members how to use the ballot box and creativity instead of hostility.

Betting that paintbrushes and petitions can persuade teen-agers to lay down guns and knives, a Woodland Hills-based health foundation has awarded $700,000 to community groups that work with gang members in the crime-torn Blythe Street and Delano Street areas.

The two Van Nuys neighborhoods are the only ones in the San Fernando Valley to benefit from grants from the California Wellness Foundation, which is spending $24 million on violence prevention throughout the state.

“It’s a really unique and interesting project,” said Crystal Hayling, program officer for the Wellness Foundation, which was created two years ago by Health Net as part of a state-brokered deal that allowed the Woodland Hills health maintenance organization to drop its nonprofit status. “It’s really looking at a community that is underserved and affected by violence.”

Community Youth Gang Services, the lead organization in the four-year project, plans to reduce youth and sexual violence by encouraging teen-agers and adults to take charge of their crime-plagued neighborhoods.

Through discussion groups in schools and voter registration and education efforts, the project’s directors aim to mobilize residents to fight violence at home, at school and on the streets.

“The areas selected are some of the poorest and most overcrowded in the city of Los Angeles, where violence is endemic,” said project coordinator Anthony Borbon. “We looked at this as an opportunity to get involved in the root causes of the violence.” Part of the grant will be spent in the Pico-Union district.

After nine months of study involving several dozen community members, the directors stitched together a network of community and school organizations that will work together to promote alternatives to violence.

A major component of the plan is school-based discussion. Groups that encourage interracial communication, anger management and leadership skills will be formed at Van Nuys Middle School, Fulton Middle School in Van Nuys and James Monroe High School in North Hills as well as three Pico-Union schools. In addition, the grant will pay for creation of an arts project in conjunction with the Chicano studies department at Cal State Northridge.

Manuel Velasquez, a veteran Valley gang counselor, will head the arts project, which will include comic books, street theater productions, mural painting and newsletters, all with the message of violence prevention.

“These are real non-traditional approaches,” Velasquez said. “We wanted to do something different.”

Program directors also plan to educate low-income residents in techniques of grass-roots political action. For example, a community group could decide that a billboard in the neighborhood promotes violence against women and organize a boycott or petition against the advertiser, said Borbon.

“It’s not a top-down program,” he said. “If adults and youth have an idea, they will make a decision what they want to do. We are just the conduit.”

Also included in the proposal is a child-care cooperative at the Monroe High School family center to teach parenting skills to teen-agers.