Coming of age has a very different meaning for 16-year-old Keenan Smith than it does for many Seattle teens.
On Jan. 11, one of Smith's friends, 14-year-old De'Che Morrison, was found under a car in Rainier Valley after bleeding to death from a gunshot wound. Two weeks later, another friend, Perry Henderson, 18, was shot at a South Seattle party and later died in the hospital.
The killings, Smith says, made him realize just how short a future he had as a Rainier Beach gang member, so he quit the life and, in June, joined a program that's helping him look a little farther down the road of possibility.
"I didn't want to be a statistic, so I turned it around," says Smith, a South Lake High School student who's now working toward college.
The program he joined is called Youth 180, a Rainier Beach nonprofit formed in March in response to the violence. The faith-based program offers course study, mentoring and fun activities to participants like Smith, who in turn go out on the streets and talk to other youth about turning their lives around -- the kind of outreach Mayor Greg Nickels says he wants to pay for in a citywide anti-gang initiative announced Sept. 10.
With Smith and other teen members of Youth 180 lined up behind him at a press event at the Garfield Teen Center, Nickels said he is budgeting $9 million over the next two years for a youth violence prevention program that will provide services and support to 800 middle-schoolers identified as having truancy or school problems, along with juvenile offenders who are returning.
The multi-agency effort calls for putting more police in middle schools, adding more late-night activities at community centers, and funding social-service and church programs that provide structure, opportunities and job training, with some programs to hire "violence interrupters," such as ex-gang members who will work to curb gang activity on the street.
The goal, Nickels said Sept. 10, is to cut youth violence in half in the first year of the initiative.
"Whether it's helping children to stay in school, to re-enter society or to deal with the anger, the agenda should be to intervene at a crucial time in that child's life," Nickels said. "No longer will we expect children to come to us. We will go to them."
The services would start next May through networks being set up in three areas of the city, with the Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle to coordinate the Central District's system, the Atlantic Street Center to handle Southeast Seattle, and Southwest Youth and Family Services to oversee the Southwest network.
Each organization will work out the details of which specific agencies in its area should offer what services to achieve a coordinated approach. To do that, Urban League director James Kelly is already working with the University of Washington to do "asset mapping" of services in the area, along with planning meetings to engage service providers and community members.
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