Youth Summit Sets an Example

What’s Ventura County doing to support and assist its young people?

Quite a bit. There are scores of organizations working to help young people in the eastern half of the county alone. Last week they took an important step toward making their efforts more effective: They got together to get acquainted and get coordinated.

More than 130 people participated in the all-day “Asset Building Summit for Youth” convened by Supervisors Frank Schillo and Judy Mikels at Amgen headquarters in Thousand Oaks. Many were amazed to find so many organizations engaged in similar efforts to help keep the area’s youths in school, out of trouble, productively occupied and motivated to grow and learn and stretch their horizons.

The challenges they recounted covered the full economic range. Lisa Safeinili of Many Mansions described how a woman reduced to raising her children with only a car for a home was able to get her life back on track with help from the Stoll Community House. Todd Haines, chair of the municipal advisory committee in upscale Oak Park, said his neighbors “are glad to have a boring community--but unfortunately it’s also boring for our teenagers.”

By the end of the day they had brainstormed, made wish lists and formed action plans. Most importantly, they had formed alliances that should help keep kids from falling through the cracks between programs and help attract grant funding for worthy projects.

The effort to pull together East County youth programs has been underway for four years, hindered a bit by the knowledge that the area’s major cities of Simi Valley and Thousand Oaks are consistently rated among the most crime-free in the nation.

“We’re working to take care of the needs that we know we have, even if people in the rest of the county don’t think we do,” Mikels put it.

For all their variety of strategies, the advocates agreed that young people need to receive strong, consistent messages from their families, schools and law enforcement agencies. These include defining acceptable behavior but also affirming that youths are valued, respected, loved, encouraged and listened to.

In a perfect world, each home, classroom and media message would reinforce that theme. But because the world is not perfect--even in the relatively safe suburbs of eastern Ventura County--each individual and community group must share the job. The youth summit was a good step toward that worthy goal.