Peace Project : Woman Organizes Outings and Rewards for At-Risk Youths Who Combat Violence

For five years, Carol Adams’ ark has been sailing through rough waters.

Adams is captain of Peacekeepers ARK--short for Acknowledge and Reward Kids--a countywide program that rewards youths who learn and practice conflict-resolution skills.

With a cargo of donated sports tickets, boxed burrito dinners and shopping spree certificates, she tries to make a dent in the most troubled neighborhoods of Los Angeles.

She rewards about 200 youngsters a month. To qualify, they must submit a written paragraph describing how they stopped a fight or prevented one.

“Every certificate represents a fight that didn’t happen,” she says.

It’s an unlikely task for a bubbly, 57-year-old former public relations worker who lives in Beverly Hills.

But Adams knows the pain she is trying to prevent.

During the 1992 riots she returned to the South-Central Los Angeles neighborhood where her daughter, Kyra, had attended South Park Elementary School in the late ‘60s. There she helped bring canned food, diapers and clothing to terrorized families as part of an emergency relief drive.

“A girl there came up to me, smiled, and nonchalantly showed me where she took a bullet,” Adams said. “It was so shocking. It was like she was showing me an ‘A’ in last week’s English paper. The kids have come to accept violence as a norm. I felt compelled to change that in some way.”

With 24 years of public relations work under her belt, she launched the program from her Beverly Hills duplex, where she moved after she separated from her husband and Kyra left for college. She works mostly from her home computer and phone to generate donations.

On Wednesday night, Adams rounded up 20 “peacemakers” at the Ramona Gardens housing projects in East Los Angeles and drove them to Inglewood to see the Laker-Cleveland basketball game. The group, ages 15 to 27, consisted of “at-risk” once-hard-core gang members who had demonstrated that they’d resisted gang violence. Five student mentors from Hawthorne High School joined them.

At the noisy arena, the group munched on foil-wrapped burritos donated by Eduardo’s Border Grill and passed around binoculars.

Adams focuses her energies on elementary and high schools mostly in the Eastside, South-Central Los Angeles, Venice, Hawthorne and the San Fernando Valley. She works with the district attorney’s office’s Bureau of Crime and Prevention Services to identify violence prevention programs and youths who resisted gang influence.

The letters she sifts through tell stories like this one submitted by George Soriano, 15, who mentors youths at the Blythe Street housing project in Panorama City:

“Once when I was in the seventh grade, me and my friend saw these guys beating up this kid in an alley, so me and my friend scared these bullies by yelling out, in make believe, that the cops were coming. The bullies ran and left the injured kid in the ground. Me and my friend helped him get home OK.”

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The freebies often lure children into other career counseling or mentoring programs at schools, Adams said.

“The program is another sign of how diverse violence prevention methods are,” said Anthony Borbon, associate director of the Violence Prevention Coalition of Greater Los Angeles. “The incentives affect them directly. Some may not have the opportunity to get out to see a sports event.”

“It’s a good idea because for some the projects is their whole world,” said George Beltran, 17, one of the youths Adams brought to the Laker game. He said he became involved in gang violence and drugs at age 9. Today he is a Lincoln High School junior and plans to study pre-medicine at UC Berkeley.

“It’s gangs, drinking, drugs. . . . It’s good to get out of that madness for a night,” he said.