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Gary Yates Introduction |
Brian Contreras
Joan Cuadra
Constance Rice
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Q & A Brian Contreras
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How do you gain the trust of the youth you work with? |
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I used to believe that in order to truly work with hardcore
gang members, you had to have been there. That’s not the way it is. I’ve got
13 people working for me, and none of them have been involved in gangs. None
of them have ever been arrested in their life, but they have such a good
relationship with the kids. It’s all about what’s in their hearts. |
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What do you thing are the root causes of violence in
Salinas? |
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It’s poverty, it’s density, it’s
dysfunctional families. It’s all of those things that everybody says, but it
is that and more. Our community is a very divided community – those that
have, and those that don’t. The hatred and the animosity trickles down
generation to generation. Most of our kids that are involved in gangs, when
we ask them why [they say], “It’s because I had to.” They’re doing it
because of a need to be protected.
Everything we do here [at 2nd Chance], it’s all got to be
positive. This [place] is neutral. I’ve had rivals literally sitting on the
same couch. You can come here in safety. This is a respectful place. I have
rules posted at all my offices. |
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What are the rewards of your work? |
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The rewards of my work are seeing those who I knew would have died otherwise
actually becoming self-sustaining and good community minded-individuals.
At North Salinas High School, over a three-year period we saw a 95
percent reduction in weapons incidents, 65 percent reduction in gang fights.
The expulsion rate went from something like 22 or 23 to three. |
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At times when you’re about to give up, what keeps you going? |
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The ones that I know who are now successes in life. The
ones who graduated from the Police Academy, the ones who are principals now,
the ones who are government people. Those people who I helped out, I go to
them now, when I’m down in the dumps. We’re all like an extended family. I
send them Christmas cards, and I get pictures of their grandkids and their
children. |
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Q & A Joan Cuadra
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In what ways have you worked to bring peace to your
community? |
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We’re trying to bring peace within the family, for
instance, the relationship between alcohol and domestic violence. A great
deal of domestic violence, verbal and physical, is committed when people are
under the influence of alcohol and drugs. A lot of times, the focus is on
the alcoholic and addict, but the families have been impacted and suffered
many times more than the actual alcoholic or addict. A lot of times, if
you want to educate a family, you educate their kids, because their kids go
back and carry the message. Within families that recently immigrated to the
United States, a lot of times kids are the translators and educators for
their parents. |
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What would make your work even more effective? |
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When we initially got funding to do our pesticide safety
training and domestic violence education programs, we found that there was a
lack of materials that were culturally and linguistically appropriate. So we
developed [our own] domestic violence curriculum, because a lot of times,
we’re working with populations that have literacy issues. And what
[generally] happens is, we think one curriculum fits all, but that isn’t the
way it is. We need to develop materials that took into account people’s
literacy levels, how people learn, and ways to encourage, make people feel
comfortable in receiving information and talking about it. I would say that
there are a lot of good materials out there, but I hadn’t seen many good
materials out there that are low literacy. |
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How do you gain the trust and support of the people in the
communities you work with? |
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When you’re open and honest with people, and you let them
know you don’t have all the answers, and you don’t over promise, and you
just go in there as someone who’s teachable, and you approach people with "I
don’t have all the answers, I’m here to share something with you, and I also
expect you to share something with us," people can feel that sincerity. It
takes a lot of courage to ask a question when you’re not super confident
about yourself, and you haven’t been encouraged to ask questions, even a
simple question like "could you repeat that" or "I didn’t understand that."
And it’s important that when people ask that there be somebody there who’s
sensitive to that person’s struggle, and who’s going to be courteous, who’s
going to really want to give that person the answer – not put them down. |
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Q & A
Constance Rice
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Why would you say you were being recognized? |
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Probably because in every piece of work that I do, I’m
knitting communities together. And any teamwork requires [a] kind of bridge
building and weaving together of different interests – experts, lawyers,
grassroots organizers, all kinds of technical assistants and so forth. So
if you think about peace as a dynamic, it has to be the basis of any kind of
teamwork. In the more narrow sense of peace, meaning an absence of violence,
an absence of fear, obviously, if you don’t have freedom from fear and
freedom from violence, there are no other freedoms. So it [peace] is central
to any kind of civic democracy that has everybody coming to the table. |
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What keeps you going? |
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I don’t even think of it that way. It’s such a privilege to
do this work. I’m just glad to get involved and look forward to making it
really work. I look at the communities that have been left behind
structurally, economically, politically, educationally, and what keeps me
going is the knowledge that if a lot of people before me had decided to do
what was good for only them, we wouldn’t have the freedoms we enjoy today. A
lot of people sacrificed their lives, their time, their opportunities to
ensure that I stand where I stand today. We’ve made enormous progress,
progress my grandmother never thought she would see, but when you see what’s
left to be done, we have to keep working. |
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There has been a lot of talk about crime and violence going
down. What’s the status of violence and crime in the communities you’ve been
working in? |
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Statistics are averages and aggregates. You’ve got to
look at communities, community by community. There are communities that are
so far behind that they couldn’t find jobs even during this most recent
gilded age. In the year 2000 people with graduate and college degrees had a
record low unemployment rate of three percent, but for the poorest folks,
the unemployment rate was above 24 percent. So, if they weren’t employable in a
golden age economy, when will we ever employ them? We have to come up with a
radically different model to reach the poorest of the poor.
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What are some strategies that would bring about healthier
communities in particular the communities you’ve worked in? |
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I would just make sure that these children got the basics -
an environment where they didn’t fear violence, had no expectation of
violence and weren’t expected to engage in it just to get from school to
home. That doesn’t seem to be asking too much. |
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