New Home Unveiled For Street Outreach Workers 2.0

New Haven’s reborn street anti-violence crew now has a clubhouse available 24/7 to bring kids in trouble, to feed them, to talk one on one, to mediate beefs, to substitute assistance and calm for violence.

The clubhouse also equipped with a spiffy recording studio so the kids can express themselves.

The crew now has a new, reliable stream of funding, contracts to do mediation and prevention inside the school system before violence occurs.

All that news about ending youth violence on the streets of New Haven, Hamden, and points beyond emerged Friday at the festive opening of the Connecticut Violence Intervention Program (CVIP)‘s new Ashmun Street HQ.

The newly formed CVIP is a reconfiguration of New Haven’s Street Outreach Workers program. The program sends outreach workers — some of them former convicts who have turned their lives around — to the scene of shootings and to hospital rooms to help 13 to 25-year-olds involved in violence straighten out underlying beefs without continuing the carnage. The workers have been credited with working with cops and the community to lower New Haven’s violence to a 50-year low.

Leonard Jahad, former head of adult probation in the New Haven area took over the group in 2015 and restructured it recently under the banner of the Connecticut Violence Intervention Program.

In the company of 200 friends and supporters from the police, youth, education and other services intimately involved in youth violence and its many ripple effects, CVIP chief Leonard Jahad, cut the ribbon Friday for the group’s new headquarters at 230 Ashmun St., the community center at the Monterey Place public housing development.

The program launched in 2007 under the auspices of the New Haven Family Alliance. Workers helped negotiate truces (like this one) and, in the view of law enforcement, worked with cops to bring shootings in New Haven to the lowest level in decades. At its height, the program had eight full-time outreach workers plus a director. The city was just one of numerous financial supporters.

Over the years the program’s funding dried up. Last year the workers told the city the program was on the verge of closing. Jahad — who previously ran the program at Family Alliance since 2015 — formed his new nonprofit and dubbed it CVIP. He brought along four veteran street outreach workers with deep ties in city neighborhoods: William ​“Juneboy” Outlaw, Douglas Bethea, Pepe Vega, and Lopez Jones.

As pediatric trauma surgeons mingled with social workers and cops, Outlaw, who has been an outreach worker since 2009, was one of the centers of attention. Outlaw, known as ​“JB,” is the subject of a new book.

“He believes in my leadership of the outreach team,” Outlaw said of Jahad. He was at pains to commend all the outreach workers who have been with the program since its in inception since 2007, although he and Pepe Vega are the only ones left from the original crew. ANd they’re working not just in New Haven.

Thanks in no small part to an emergency mediation that Outlaw conducted in the Hamden school system, Jahad reported, CVIP now has a contract with the Hamden schools to intervene in a crisis as well as to provide training, mediation, and mentoring.

Several speakers Friday mentioned the high hopes for the center’s recording studio.

The studio was contributed by CVIP board members Michael and Kristin Song of Guilford. Their 15-year-old son Ethan was killed when an unsecured gun, which he and a friend were handling, discharged. That led led to the recent passing of Ethan’s Law, mandating safe storage for weapons. U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal said he is working to make that happen nationally.

“You can do all the community policing, but if this did not exist, I don’t know where I’d turn for this service,” Hamden Mayor Curtis Leng said of the outreach workers. He was one of nearly a dozen speakers who offered words of gratitude and praise, including Blumenthal and Gov. Ned Lamont.

“It gives me a level of comfort,” Leng continued. ​“I can call Jahad, and he says, ​‘We are there already.’”

“You’ve got to build a relationship, one-on-one,” he said, with each young person, Outlaw said. ​“You do that by sharing something of you with the kid.”

He spoke of aiming not just for prevention, but for redemption as well.

“When you change, you are redeemed. Let’s bring out the best in this person, he can improve, and then his community improves,” Outlaw said.

“They go to areas and to talk to people who won’t talk to us,” New Haven Asst. Police Chief Karl Jacobson said of the outreach workers.

“We say to them, ​‘Go and talk to this group of kids.’ They don’t give us names, because that’s going to affect their credibility. New Haven’s experience, the significant decrease, a lot of that is attributable to them as well as us.”

Jacobson concluded by turning to Lamont and Blumenthal and saying: ​“Governor and Sen. Blumenthal, we can’t do this alone. We need this throughout the state.”

Jahad said his crew’s partnership with the police, school system, and Yale-New Haven Hospital’s injury and violence prevention program is unique in the country.

The current funding for the program, Jahad reported, is $160,000 from New Haven’s Youth Services Department, $80,000 from the New Haven Board of Ed, and $60,000 from the Hamden police department, with other significant grants pending.

For more information or to support the work, check this website or call 203 – 553-7282.