New Haven Independent

For background on the outreach program, to be run with the police department and community volunteers and aimed at at-risk teens, click here and here.

The aldermanic Youth Services Committee shared its hopes and worries for the program on Wednesday night. City Hall’s social services chief, Kica Matos (shown), said her department is working with the police to find qualified community-based organizations to run the administrative aspect of the program and to provide individuals who will work as Street Outreach Workers. She emphasized that these individuals will not be working for the police, but will instead reach out to the kids with alternatives in the form of various youth services.

Che Dawson (pictured), a City employee who heads DeStefano’s Youth Initiative, knows the alternatives most kids want: jobs. “Young people want to be valued and to be independent,” he said. Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as matching kids to a McDonald’s or C-Town. Since the young people most likely to be targeted by Street Outreach Workers aren’t ready for careers, Dawson explained, it could be dangerous to put them in entry-level jobs that are bound to plateau and leave them dissatisfied and likely to re-engage in risky behavior. Among the alternatives the program will offer are training and preparation for upwardly mobile jobs.

Alderman Yusuf Shah expressed worry about delegating these services to community agencies. “We do a good job at assessing the problem,” he said, “but we’re not so good at follow-up. It seems like we give people money and then let them go.” Matos explained that her department wants to support existing youth organizations, but that these organizations will be carefully selected and supervised to ensure that they use the extra funds to reach out to more young people.

Also on the Youth Services agenda was discussion of a recent Youth Council retreat. A dozen current Council members, all high school students, escaped from the city for a night of talking, role-playing, and workshopping to develop their leadership abilities. Newhallville Alderwoman Alfreda Edwards (pictured) led the retreat with the help of Dawson and Matos, who conducted a workshop on abolishing use of the N-word. Matos provided the kids with historical and contextual information from the website www.abolishthenword.com and had them debate various cases and viewpoints. “I was really impressed by the level of discourse,” she said, beaming. By the end, most everyone agreed that the word should no longer be used, even as a “reclamation.”

Dawson reflected on the challenges of teaching young people “what it means to get people to respect your leadership.” There’s still a lot of leadership development to be done, he said, but overall the retreat was very successful.

Alderman Shah emphatically supported Dawson’s work with the Youth Council. Despite the difficulty and sometimes discouraging nature of his own youth work, Shah is driven to persevere by the belief that “kids want guidance. They resist it, they’re going to argue with you, but in the end, they want guidance.” Among many other things, guidance is what New Haven’s dedicated and passionate youth advocates strive to provide to their young citizens.