Pasadena Coalition Struggles to Attain Harmony : Nonviolence: Formed amid outrage over the slayings of three youths, a year later the politically potent group has raised funds for youth.

The early morning sun had yet to warm the gray stone walls of All Saints Episcopal Church. But inside a conference room, 15 members of the Coalition for a Non-Violent City steering committee sat at tables littered with empty plastic-foam coffee cups.

They were 35 minutes into a full court press by Pasadena City Councilman Isaac Richard. With his trademark angry rhetoric and political moralizing, he urged them to back him when he proposes that the council ban concealed weapons at all city-sanctioned public meetings.

The group’s members, however, were wary of entangling themselves in Richard’s personal political battles.

One coalition member asked politely: Did the councilman have someone on the seven-member council to second his proposal?

“If the coalition shows up, I’ll have seven votes!” Richard shot back.

The incident illustrates the clout carried by the year-old anti-violence coalition. Spawned by outrage over last year’s Halloween-night killings of three boys mistakenly gunned down by gang members, the Coalition for a Non-Violent City has rolled through Pasadena like a downhill snowball, picking up money, support and influence.

During the past year, the group incorporated as a nonprofit agency, raised $360,000, spent $40,000 on a giant community meeting, put 1,100 people on its mailing list and opened offices in Old Pasadena.

Yet, in some ways, the coalition still is struggling to coalesce.

Members argue, sometimes in tears and anger, over whether it should offer traditional, social work-type programs or address racism in society. The coalition’s unwieldy, Hydra-headed committee system lacks an overall game plan. Some have rejected the group’s meetings as elitist talkfests that are short on action. Others, many of them young people at risk on the streets, know nothing about it.

Those most involved are not disheartened, pointing out that although people are arguing, at least they’re talking to each other. Many of them are from such different walks of Pasadena life that, under ordinary circumstances, they probably would never have even met each other.

“The coalition represents a movement, not a program,” insists the group’s co-founder, Shirley Adams.

With almost missionary zeal, Adams recounted a recent meeting that brought together the mother of a slain child, an Altadena gangbanger, a high school principal and a Junior League member.

“There’s a whole level of discussion going on in the city that has never taken place before,” said Adams, head of the Pasadena-Foothill branch of the Los Angeles Urban League. “The coalition could be one of the most significant structures put in place in Pasadena.”

Indeed, in the coalition’s early days, the governor’s office sent a query to the group asking what it was working on, after it looked like an unusual movement was afoot in Pasadena. Residents had organized quickly in the wake of the shock and outrage that gripped the city after three young teen-age boys, mistaken for gang members, were gunned down by gang members on Halloween night, 1993, in central Pasadena.

A first meeting of 12 community leaders called by George Regas, the rector of All Saints Episcopal Church, was followed by a second meeting of 50 participants; hundreds more began attending as meeting after meeting took place. Participants included city department heads, social-service agency workers, community activists and residents.

The coalition initially focused on gun control. But as more people got involved, the group increasingly turned its attention to the roots of violence: lack of job opportunities, run-down schools and housing, and racism directed against large segments of Pasadena’s population, Adams said.

The group focused particularly on the Northwest Pasadena area, where many of the city’s low-income black and Latino residents live and which is plagued by gang violence.

More than $360,000 has been raised, including $100,000 from the Irvine Foundation and $250,000 from the city of Pasadena. With part of the money, a coalition office in the Dodsworth Building in Old Pasadena was opened and three staff members were hired.

The coalition also spread $75,000 among 17 grass-roots agencies and individuals that provide programs for young people, from theater projects and on-air radio and television training programs to drill and drum team performances and an overnight trip to the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

An Oct. 1 conference held by the coalition at the Pasadena Center drew more than 800 people. At the conference, which cost $40,000, attendees were fed a free breakfast and lunch while they attended seven different workshops on violence. A follow-up meeting Nov. 1 resulted in the creation of six independent task forces. Each task force is devising a plan of action. Another citywide meeting is planned for March 15.

The group is trying to decide how to spend the remaining $150,000 in city money.

Yet, as it begins a second year, serious fissures have erupted in the coalition’s image of unity and momentum.

At the Nov. 1 meeting, community activist Roy Hayes, who prefers to use the African name of Malik, challenged the group to allow in-depth discussions of racism. He was cut off by Adams and stormed out of the meeting hall, protesting loudly.

Later at the same meeting, coalition steering committee members Rena Dyson and Sharon Anderson came close to tears of frustration in a hallway as they argued with Adams and Regas. Dyson and Anderson, who founded the We Care group to keep Pasadena’s streets quiet after the 1992 Los Angeles riots, had numerous complaints about the coalition but they followed one theme: Northwest Pasadena residents, those most harmed by violence, were being ignored and pushed out of the way by others flooding into the coalition, they insisted.

“A certain segment dictates the policy and the others are supposed to go along,” Malik said on a recent morning at the Jackie Robinson Center in Northwest Pasadena. Further, every time the issue of racism is posed, the coalition shuts down the discussion, he said.

“Black men are viewed as the most violent and most underproductive element in this society,” Malik said. “It’s part of the problem that the coalition should address.”

Malik outlined a host of criticisms that have been lobbed against the coalition. Among the complaints:

* The group has busied itself in endless meetings to discuss the city’s problems, but, aside from fund raising, has produced few concrete results.

* The coalition is dominated by workers from social-service organizations and has too few everyday residents, especially blacks and Latinos who live in the Northwest section.

* Regas, a white Episcopal minister, and many others from All Saints’ predominantly white congregation and staff have taken control of the group, resulting in whites helping out minorities in an old-fashioned “colonial mentality” setup, instead of minorities taking the lead and forging the group’s direction.

* The coalition has attracted many from outside Northwest Pasadena who are not familiar with the problems there.

* The group has not created groundbreaking solutions. Instead, it upholds the status quo and fails to investigate allegations of police harassment or the effectiveness of current youth programs, which many in the Northwest believe should be examined critically.

“The coalition is trying to do good, but they don’t know exactly what’s going on,” said Tim Rhambo, a former gang member and now a community activist, as he strolled recently along Fair Oaks Avenue across from Robinson Park.

Rhambo said many coalition members sit in offices or head programs, but, in part because they don’t actually live in Northwest Pasadena, are limited in their effectiveness. It is the community’s residents, including gang members and young street leaders, who could bring peace, Rhambo said.

“The people who can regulate everything are right here,” he said, pointing toward the street. “Pay them something and tell them to do something, and I guarantee results.”

Other coalition critics come from the other end of town, such as Mark Talt.

A 34-year-old father of two who lives in the Oak Knoll neighborhood near the luxurious Ritz-Carlton Huntington Hotel, Talt, a securities broker, offended many at the Nov. 1 meeting when he stood up and confessed that he and his friends felt afraid living in Pasadena.

Looking around the room of 200 participants, he proclaimed that he didn’t recognize a single person there, and he accused the group of shutting out people like himself. His comments prompted some at the meeting to accuse Talt of caring little for the rest of the city and showing up only when he feared violence might spread to his own neighborhood.

In the days since the meeting, Talt said, he has received numerous phone calls, letters and business cards from coalition members, sympathizing with his concerns and urging him not to give up on helping out the coalition. He visited Northwest Pasadena and even showed up at the Nov. 15 steering committee meeting, where Councilman Richard appeared. Although there only to observe, Talt offered a few fund-raising suggestions when the discussion turned to money.

But Talt later said he was disappointed to find the coalition struggling with so many internal problems. And, he said, he still feels unwelcome.

“I want to help, I want to reach out, but Mark Talt carrying an olive branch will get the same (negative) reception I got before,” he said.

Regas points out that others who live in Talt’s upper-middle-class neighborhood have been actively involved with the coalition since its beginning. Equally active and welcomed into the coalition, he added, have been blacks from King’s Villages, a low-income housing project in Northwest Pasadena.

Providing understanding among those from different sections of the city has been a daunting task for the coalition and is a high priority, Regas said. But even he and Adams differ over how to get there.

Adams, whose style is personal and hands-on and who greets acquaintances with “darling” and “baby,” favors rotating coalition meetings to Northwest Pasadena. But Regas, who can be abrupt in his zeal to get things done, considers the issue of meeting locations a minor one.

Nonetheless, the coalition has committed much of its focus to Northwest Pasadena, including funding youth groups there and proposing field trips for Pasadena residents to learn more about the troubled neighborhood. But the coalition is larger than the problems of Northwest Pasadena, Regas said.

“The issue of violence covers the map,” he said.

As for criticism that those from All Saints and from other social service-oriented groups have dominated the coalition, Regas agrees but says he is working on a transfer of power, to include elections or some other method of choosing leaders. At this point, Regas chairs the coalition steering committee, composed of about 30 people, many drawn from the staff at All Saints, from social service agencies and from city of Pasadena management ranks.

Regas admits he worries about the lack of concrete progress the group has made. But like Adams, he calls the coalition a movement and not a program. As such, he said, it needs the uninitiated and newcomers, the very people that some critics say slow down the group. Through the coalition, their efforts can be channeled, both said.