Youth Gang Symposium: All About Caring

During the war against global terrorism, it is easy to overlook the fact that street gangs from Boston to San Diego represent our nation's worst foot forward.

Meanwhile, a columnist in The New York Times writes, "Guns in some neighborhoods are easier to get than schoolbooks...(and) Burying the young has long since become routine in black and Latino neighborhoods."

"Don't bother cueing the violins," continues Bob Herbert, celebrated columnist and author. "Nobody gets real excited about this."

Mr. Herbert, I must disagree: Boys & Girls Clubs of America, with some 3,700 Clubs and facilities serving more than 4.4 million kids, cares a great deal about a problem that is right at our collective front door.

Further, if you've got a moment, we'd like to tell you how excited we routinely become. Travel now to Orlando, for the 2005 OJJDP National Youth Gang Symposium, a four-day meeting co-hosted by Boys & Girls Clubs of America and the National Youth Gang Center.

With more than 1,300 youth professionals, law enforcement officers, sociologists, judges, other court officers and academics on hand, along with rehabilitated gang kids and sessions running from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., a reporter like you, or me, gets to meet good people - and, yes, to hear how much they give of themselves.

Take Club professional Nick Vastarella, from the Logan Square Boys & Girls Club in Chicago. Nick says getting close to hardened gang kids is like "being a farmer who plants seeds...and waits to see what happens." Nick speaks of a boy we'll call Tommy, a genuine gang-banger. Tommy and trouble went together like meat on bread. Four years and seven months later, Tommy regularly sits alongside Nick at Sunday Mass, and hopes to join the Marines. "I'm ready to be a man," Tommy explains.

Privately, Tommy tells Nick, "I love you, man!" Nick then throws a playful jab at Tommy: "You're like my little brother..."

"I've never worked with anyone this long," explains youth worker Vastarella, another alumnus of the street. "It's definitely a process…one that takes time." Not to mention infinite patience, determination, knowledge and forbearance. Lady Luck can help, too.

How do you rescue gang kids? The answer is always the same, yet each story comes in its own package. Maybe it begins by going to them, at least intellectually: telling them you're available, you are "open for business."

Those of us who regularly attend gang symposiums never miss the closing session, billed as "Youth Speak Out - Life After Gangs." Seated on an otherwise bare stage just now are three young men and a lone teenage woman. All four have that deer-caught-in-the-headlights look.

These are gang alumni. They are, truly, beyond the colors (the title of the symposium) and hopefully they're beyond the reach, and harm, of their onetime street partners.

For they next 90 minutes they'll serve as narrators and mentors. Yan Carlos Valdez, 18, is from Tustin, California. Duoa Yang ("I used to run the streets."), is from St. Paul (the Twin Cities Boys & Girls Club's "Getting Out" program.) and now Century College. She had never before been on an airplane. Cordero Becton, from Chicago, spent six years in a gang. Fourth up is Manuel (Manny) Rojas, 28, and father to three. Manny is a graduate of the Fort Worth (Texas) Gang Intervention Program.

The old pro, Manny readily confesses: "(In my gang life) I was hustling. I had a gun; I mean, I was packing...I was going to the electric chair...I'm adapting to a new world. (At times) I feel like an outcast with all new people...Transition (from gang life) is not easy. It's the hardest thing."

In a voice barely above a whisper, and with expressive dark eyes opened wide, Duoa Yang remembers her mother on her knees, "praying that before she died she'd see me out of the gang." Duoa began to cry then, and held a folded white handkerchief to her now flushed face.

In turn, the others all said how joining a gang was expected. It was the natural order of life, as they knew it. Getting out, and quitting the gang, happened "not because of a program. It was people!"

Yes, people. Like Nick Vastarella and all those quietly committed Club staffers wherever gang prevention and intervention efforts are implemented.

Finally, it was a 30-year veteran of the BGCA universe who delivered a valedictory. Clayton Hollopeter, executive director of the San Gabriel (Calif.) Valley Club, said: "We want the kids that normally you would kick out. These are ones you simply must help!"

By Bard Lindeman

Bard Lindeman is the author of three non-fiction books. He has been a magazine writer and editor, as well as a syndicated columnist.