Valley Focus : Mission Hills : Coalition Formed to Fight Violence

Representatives from 25 community organizations Tuesday formed a coalition to fight violence in the northeast San Fernando Valley.

The organization, called the Northeast San Fernando Valley Violence Prevention Coalition, grew out of a two-day seminar that brought together administrators from a variety of community groups working against gang warfare, domestic violence and violence as portrayed by the media.

“People feel that their community is no longer safe,” said Sister Beth McPherson of Holy Cross Medical Center in Mission Hills, which organized the seminar. “Violence is a very complex issue and, alone, organizations cannot make a difference.”

Hospital officials organized the seminar in response to the high number of shooting and stabbing victims treated in the facility’s emergency room.

The hospital began in 1993 trying to educate young schoolchildren about violence and provide at-risk teen-agers with some alternatives to the gang lifestyle. In a six-month period during 1992, the hospital treated 131 victims of gunshots and 162 with knife wounds.

Those statistics soon led to the idea for a coalition, said McPherson. “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The organizations we contacted provide a host of valuable services. It’s a matter of getting everyone on the same wavelength.”

McPherson invited the Colorado Department of Health’s Monyett Ellington and Barbara Schricker Ritchen), both experts in coalition building, to help form the local anti-violence effort.

“We’re not going to solve four centuries of problems in three weeks,” Ellington told those assembled Tuesday as she helped them outline the coalition’s objectives and draft a plan to gain support.

The list of objectives included plans to support current at-risk youth programs and to investigate forming new ones.

“We need to identify which groups in this room have the ability to hit the streets and reach the community on that level,” said William (Blinky) Rodriguez, a Van Nuys activist working with troubled teen-agers.

Despite the optimism displayed by most seminar participants, Sister Una Connolly of the North Valley Family Counseling Center, was skeptical about the level of commitment.

“We need to ask ourselves, ‘Do we have what it takes to remain members,’ ” she said.