Young People Rally for Funding for Youth Gang Services Agency

Antoinette Ramclam went to the Los Angeles City Hall steps Wednesday morning to tell anyone who would listen that Community Youth Gang Services saved her from what seemed like an inevitable life of gangs.

Raul Delabarcena described how after three jail stints and 10 years of dealing narcotics he got a job and joined the ranks of the straight and narrow. Community Youth Gang Services convinced him, he said.

The two were among about 30 young people who held a rally Wednesday in hopes of persuading the City Council to continue funding the group they say rescued them. In spite of countless anecdotal success stories, continued city support--and hence the viability of the group--is not at all guaranteed when a council committee begins its review of the agency today.

Throughout its 15-year history, the gang services agency has suffered from criticism that it lacks hard evidence of its effectiveness, from waves of leadership infighting and from a recent decision by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors to terminate county funding as of Sept. 30. The county’s vote, supervisors said at the time, was partly an effort to stem a multimillion-dollar deficit in the probation department, which funded CYGS.

Losing the city contribution would be a severe blow to the agency, which has an annual budget of about $2.5 million. The city had allocated $1.2 million for the agency during this fiscal year. The county had given it $800,000.

“We’ll just have to cut our services down,” said Dan Guzman, a CYGS supervisor. “It will just cause the homicides and violence to go up.”

Ramclam, 18, Delabarcena, 25, and the others at the City Hall rally know about violence. They decorated the Spring Street steps with pieces of paper marked “In Memory Of.” They followed that headline with a handwritten list of their friends’ names--including slain rap music star Tupac Shakur--who died violently.

“The only person I have to look up to is at Youth Gang Services--my mother didn’t take time out with me, my father didn’t take time out with me,” said 18-year-old Shanena Whitson, a high school senior and the mother of a 2-year-old girl. “That’s why these gangs get together, for someone to talk to.”

“How do they want us to get off the streets if they take away our place to go?” she asked.

The agency has ridden a rocky road on its way to Friday’s vote.

When it began in 1981 at the behest of the county, the agency’s mission and methods had never been tried. Civilian counselors, many of them former gang members themselves, took their intervention efforts to the streets--looking for at-risk youths rather than waiting for the teens to come to them.

The group’s first two directors quit or were fired. Several CYGS counselors were tied to drug deals and shootings long after they had supposedly given up their hard-core pasts, and some authorities began to criticize the group as part of the problems they were hired to help solve.

Then, as the agency tried to professionalize its ranks in the mid- to late 1980s, some gang members accused its workers of being police informers. It also endured the resentment and critiques of other community groups vying for part of its budget of several million dollars a year.

There has also been race-based criticism, with authorities and community activists saying CYGS focused its efforts more on largely Latino East Los Angeles rather than on the south and central parts of the city where African Americans are in the majority.

And in a continuation of its difficulties, just after this summer’s vote that cost it county funding, the agency’s recently resigned deputy director leveled a series of charges against the group’s board of directors, accusing it of power-grabbing and crippling the group through micromanagement.

But none of these controversies affected Ramclam or Delabarcena, who said they found in the agency a support system they didn’t have--and might have only gotten on the streets.

Gang life was an obvious draw to Ramclam, a senior at Sojourner Truth High School. Her mother’s family is associated with one gang and her father’s side of the family runs with its rival.

“The Youth Gang Services changed me around,” Ramclam said. “They made me understand . . . being in a gang ain’t going nowhere.”