Into the Abyss: What the Faith Community Could Do

Field Note: Many solutions to the gang situation involve more than one social institution. Here's an example of an approach used by a probation and parole officer which involved a local faith institution.

It was a quiet night on the street and one of the gang unit officers I was riding with told me "Things have been kind of quiet this summer. There've only been a few drive by shootings a few gang arrests." During the course of the night shift the officer spoke with several Asian gang members. We visited one who had been running away from home occasionally. As we drove by his house the officer saw him and stopped to chat. He approached the young man, placed his hands on each cheek of the man's face and welcomed him home. I was amazed. The boy allowed this expression of caring and was genuinely happy to see the officer.

The young man said he had been home for about a month and during that time, at the request of his probation officer, he and his father had attended a faith-based family relationship-building workshop. "It helped a lot." the young man said. "My father and I have been getting along for the past four weeks."

	Keep the doors of faith institutions open at night so neighborhood children can use common rooms and/or the grounds for supervised activities after school. Volunteers can be found to supervise the children among college students and those in the youth ministry at the institution. Parents and guardians of the children who may also volunteer.
	Open and maintain a dialogue in each congregation regarding issues of youth violence and gangs. This may be done through newsletters, sermons, study groups, in a youth group setting, or otherwise. Use examples from your faith to show that patience, understanding, and non-violence are preferred and effective means of achieving one¹s goals in life.
	Incorporate anti-violence and anti-gang education and training in the congregation's education programs for both youth and adults.
	Sponsor family-oriented and youth activities which strengthen families and educate them about violence in the family (i.e., how to detect it, prevent it, intervene in it, or take legal action to end it).
	Become familiar with the network of youth-serving agencies in the community which may be used in efforts to reduce violence and gang behavior and, when needed, refer congregation members to them. Encourage your faith institution leader and congregants to serve on the board of one or more of these agencies.
	Provide a safe and caring atmosphere for youth who need to reveal their personal difficulties with violence in the home, school, or other setting. When needed, offer referral to an appropriate community-based service. A troubled child is not a sign of a troubled congregation - there are troubled children everywhere. On the contrary, referring a troubled child to get help in the community is a sign of a strong and caring congregation.
	Develop a series of seminars in each of which a different family dealing a specific problem is spotlighted. An audience for this event consists of families who have faced this same problem and dealt with it successfully. A moderator encourages members of the spotlight family to discuss the difficulties they are experiencing and facilitates an exchange of insights, experiences, and suggestions from families in the audience. This format, successfully aired on British television, may be helpful in maintaining family unity in a time of crisis.
	Neighborhood clean-up and beautification projects contribute to the overall good of the community. Some faith institutions are buying deteriorating properties in their vicinity, upgrading and improving them, then selling them. Others find contributors for needed materials then provide the labor themselves as they upgrade the exteriors and yards of neighborhood homes owned by people who could not afford to make such improvements. These improvements create a sense of pride in one's community, and communities which take pride in themselves may experience less in the way of gangs and youth violence than communities that don't.
	Sponsor a program which raises money to support youth-serving agencies in the community. A bake sale, car wash, garage sale, festival, or other event can generate income annually for the agencies.
	Adopt an agency which promotes non-violence among youth. The entire congregation can participate or groups in it (i.e., study groups, youth groups, the men's- or women's study group) may each adopt an agency. Offer special and public recognition for congregants who participate in these activities.
	Collaborate and coordinate efforts with other faith institutions in order to maximize the faith community's impact on reducing gang activity and youth violence. Adopt a community-wide theme for such efforts.
	When needed, pair congregants who are experienced parents with newly pregnant congregants for mentoring prior to and following the birthing experience. The impact of such a program on reducing violence at home and increasing parenting skills and confidence can be significant.
	Some children get into trouble because there are no meaningful or enjoyable alternative activities available or because they don't have the money, transportation, or clothes necessary to participate in of some of the community's activities. A congregation can offer free events for these children. If not, they can help by transporting these children to, and pay the entry fees needed for, events (i.e., the circus, horseback riding, a faith-based concert, Bible camp).

Into The Abyss:
A Personal Journey into the World of Street Gangs

by Mike Carlie, Ph.D.
Copyright © 2002 Michael K. Carlie
Continually updated.

Building personal assets among youth:
The Search Institute offers some valuable insights on the assets which faith communities instill in their youth and the assets it may be neglecting to build. A considerable amount of information on Increasing Congregations' Asset-Building Potential is also presented at their Website. The Institute also offers several booklets for congregations wishing to explore ways to build assets among youth. Go to "Category," select "Congregation," then click "Search the Catalog."

Providing facilities for youth programs:
Faith institutions have resources which, when used to further non-violence among our youth, become important assets to a neighborhood or community. A parking lot or plot of land can become the scene of a car wash to help support area youth-serving agencies or the site of a neighborhood-wide softball game and picnic.

Activities such as these (and there are scores of other possibilities) encourage and reward involvement. They involve youth and give them pride in themselves and what they are doing. They also build a sense of "community" and of ownership. Why would youths choose to destroy that which they have built, are proud of, and admire? Community-based youth-serving agencies outside the faith community would be grateful if offered access to the indoor or outdoor space owned by the faith community's institutions for a special program/activity or two each year.

Field Note: A member of the oversight council for at-risk boys living in several state-owned local group homes told me "We have a congregation that allows our at-risk youth to hold an annual baseball competition on some land they have behind their church.
"Each year the gathering gets larger, more and more teams enter the competition, and each year the group homes boys leave the field in better condition then when they first stepped on it. They're grateful for the privilege to use the land and have a wonderful time playing ball. None of this would have been possible without the foresight and generosity of the congregation that owns the land."

Establishing a secure group home for at-risk youth:
Allegheny County (Pittsburgh), PA, received an Accountability-Based Community (ABC) Intervention Program grant in 1993 from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. The ABC Project tried in other ways to recruit local community institutions into the effort to reclaim young offenders, with substantial results in the form of several new community-based intervention programs.

For example, the ABC Project sponsored a providers forum attended by 70 community service representatives. One of the problems aired at the forum was the disproportionate confinement and court-involvement of African American juveniles in Allegheny County. After the forum, a faith-based African American community organization came forward with the idea for Issachar House, a community-run, community-staffed secure group home for teenage African American males just starting on the road to delinquency.

	Becoming active in youth affairs: Most congregants look to their faith leaders as role models - models who set the tone in the congregation for relating to one another in a non-violent manner. Models may, through the way in which they live their personal lives, bring support to the broader community's efforts to support youth and reduce youth violence. Congregants involved in community-based activities to reduce gang activity and youth violence and who actively participate as members of local task force groups or serve as youth agency board members make a valuable contribution to the community.
	Emulating The Jeremiah Project: Providing faith-based outreach to at-risk youths in the Washington, D.C., area, The Jeremiah Project conducted a survey which found area faith-based efforts "fell into five major categories: tutoring programs; youth groups; evangelization; gang violence prevention; and mentoring." (page) One of their programs is Teen Outreach and Gang Prevention.
	*Providing Hope Now For Youth:* Hope Now For Youth provides opportunities and support for young men who want to break their ties with gangs by changing their lives and becoming productive, responsible and law-abiding parents and citizens. Hope Now for Youth accomplishes this by providing a) a caring relationship which builds self-worth and confidence, b) models of Judeo-Christian values and work ethics which inspire productive citizenship, c) preparation for and placement in a job as an achievable economic alternative to gang crime and violence, d) tutoring and scholarships which encourage further education, and e) training of families in healthy relationships.
	Partnering through The Faith Community Network: The purpose of this Florida Department of Juvenile Justice effort is to form a comprehensive partnership in which the faith community and community organizations with faith-based approaches provide voluntary prevention, intervention, diversion, and aftercare programs for at-risk and delinquent youth.
	Replicating Victory Outreach: Learn about Victory Outreach and the over 500 churches and ministries with centers in 18 countries from Mexico to the Netherlands to the Philippines. Victory Outreach reports that it has helped thousands of drug addicts and gang members become productive members of society.
	The Center for Neighborhood Enterprise Societal problems addressed by CNE's grassroots network include youth violence, substance abuse, teen pregnancy, homelessness, joblessness, poor education and deteriorating neighborhoods. The Center for Neighborhood Enterprise provides effective community and faith-based organizations with training and technical assistance, links them to sources of support, and evaluates their experience for public policy.
	Tutoring and Keeping Lines of Communication Open Kevin Ingram, associate pastor of Central Baptist Church in downtown Gainesville (FL), has received a gang initiation of sorts. And it's been an unsettling experience. "This is something I never thought I'd have to deal with," said Ingram, a North Hall resident. But after his church launched Oasis, a twice-weekly tutorial program targeting disadvantaged youth, he realized he couldn't ignore the gang problem. "We discovered we had several children in our program who were involved with gangs, or who had older brothers who were in gangs," Ingram said. "We felt we had an obligation to address that and put a stop to it."

	Creating an Innerchange Program: Innerchange is a faith-based prison pre-release program (offered several months prior to an inmates release from prison) sponsored by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. The mission of Innerchange "is to create and maintain a prison environment that fosters respect for God’s law, the rights of others, and to encourage the spiritual and moral regeneration of offenders to the end that they develop responsible and productive relationships with their Creator, families and communities." (page)
	Supporting a local Straight Ahead Ministries: The goal of Straight Ahead Ministries is to see every juvenile institution opened to ministry, every youthful offender given the opportunity to hear and respond to the Gospel, every Christian called to juvenile offender ministry trained, and every believing juvenile offender offered discipleship. (page link broken as of October 2002)
	Prison Fellowship Ministries:

	Offering education and counseling on abuse: Workshops and sermons which address timely and sensitive issues such as spousal abuse, child abuse, and substance abuse are perhaps difficult to broach, but also provide an important avenue for healing and personal change.
	Providing anger-management counseling: Congregations which offer anger management or conflict resolution workshops for their youth provide a needed and valuable service. If the congregation's youth do not have problems dealing with anger (which is not likely), then they have much to learn in the workshops by way of helping other children deal with their anger.
	Reducing gun violence: Project Impact is a data-driven effort designed to reduce, interdict, and prevent youth gun violence in Omaha (NE). Many of the individuals involved in youth gun violence have gang affiliations. Police, criminal justice representatives from Federal, state, and local agencies, local community service providers, members of the faith community, and grass roots organizations have come together to address gun violence.
	Creating a violence-free zone: "In Washington, D.C., the faith-based Alliance for Concerned Men, a grassroots organization, was instrumental in establishing a Violence-Free Zone (also) in the Benning Terrace public housing project with assistance from the Center for Neighborhood Enterprise (CNE) and the Washington, D.C. Housing Authority.

"Each of these three components contributed to the effort - CNE provided technical assistance; the alliance carried out grassroots intervention in gang conflicts; and the Housing Authority provided job opportunities such as refurbishing the neighborhood, removing graffiti, and landscaping. Together they constitute the necessary structure for implementing a Violence-Free Zone. [The United States Housing and Urban Development corporation) and [the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention] are supporting the establishment of Violence-Free Zones in cities such as Dallas, TX; Indianapolis, IN; and Los Angeles, CA." (page)