Extracurricular Learning

A few days after his release from a juvenile boot camp in Saugus, Luis Ramos got some life-changing advice.

A teacher told the 15-year-old Panorama City boy to check out New Directions for Youth, a Van Nuys community service organization where he could take classes and get counseling. He did, and two months later, Luis says, he’s ready to give back to the place that provided him with much needed support.

Luis will represent New Directions for Youth at Save the Children’s Youth Voice Summit today through Sunday at the Burbank Hilton. He will be one of 55 young leaders and adult supervisors who will talk about their experiences with after-school programs and participate in management training.

By the end of the three-day summit, Save the Children organizers said they hope to produce a report that will reflect the views of the young delegates about what does and doesn’t work in after-school programs and offer suggestions for organizations planning to set up such programs.

Save the Children, a Connecticut-based national and international youth assistance organization, is using the conference as a guide for its newly created program, “Web of Support Out-of-School Time Initiative.”

Begun this spring, the initiative is a nationwide collaboration of community-based partnerships providing after-school programs for at-risk youths, according to Diana Aldridge, public affairs director. Nationwide, there are 45 community-based partnerships providing 70 after-school programs, including Pacoima’s Promise. The Pacoima program is a collaboration of New Directions for Youth, Los Angeles Team Mentoring, which provides mentors, and Woodcraft Rangers, which sponsors camping activities.

“New Directions changed my life, gave me something I never had,” Luis said. “Now I’m here representing them.”

To kick off the conference, Luis and the other delegates held a “Youth Service Day” on Thursday at Pacoima Middle School. Joined by government officials, celebrities and middle school students, the young people spent the day picking up trash, fixing the basketball courts, painting a surrealistic floral mural and planting a campus garden.

Catherine Milton, vice president of Save the Children’s U.S. programs, said the organization wanted to have a service day at the site of one of its after-school programs.

“It’s a great way to help the community and get people out,” she said.

La-Verna Fountain, director of community programs for Save the Children, said within three years, the organization hopes to expand its $26-million after-school initiative to 100 community partners. On the local level, Fountain said, the Pacoima program is charged this year with adding 70 more members to reach 100.

Pacoima’s Promise recruits at-risk students who show leadership skills and a desire to change, and offers them counseling, discussion sessions and camping trips.

Save the Children has allocated more than $1 million to launch the Pacoima program, its only partnership in Los Angeles, Fountain said.

Pacoima was chosen as a site, she said, because of the area’s need and potential for growth.

“It’s an area we knew was low-income and an area that has not received a great deal of attention,” Fountain said. “We wanted to go somewhere that we knew in three years we’d see a measurable difference.”

Rafael Ramirez, a Pacoima Middle School seventh-grader, said the counseling and discussion sessions have helped him to become a better student and to stay out of trouble.

“They got me more excited to learn and showed me how to be more friendly,” said Rafael, who had been working on the mural since the early morning.

Maria E. Wale, principal of the middle school, said the students had a large say in the plans for the service day. She said about the same time Save the Children approached her, two teachers asked for permission to clean up the campus.

“It was sort of a marriage of two ideas,” Wale said.

Event organizer Jose Oromi said the students submitted plans and ideas and then helped implement them. He said they did about 40% of the work and the rest was done by Save the Children and Americorp volunteers.

Lorne Needle, 32, who works with a Save the Children program in San Francisco, spent part of the afternoon weeding the cracks in the pavement of an outdoor basketball court with a screwdriver. Afterward, he said, he and others would clean the court and paint lines.

“It seems like a small job just cleaning and painting, but it doesn’t look so small when I’m down here weeding,” Needle said.