If we want to end economic isolation and build wealth in the marginalized community, our thinking about the path towards that vision needs to change. More professional services is what we have bet on up to now. More schooling, more certification, more health services, more training, more safety measures, more calls for better leadership, better programs.

There are growing examples of how the transformation toward more economic equity and social justice will come from valuing and focusing on the capacity of neighborhood people. One example of this is in Tarrant County Texas and the YAP program. Since 1992 the Youth Advocate Program (YAP) in Tarrant County, Texas, has been successfully providing a neighborhood-based alternative to sending juveniles into correctional institutions. Gary Ivory shared insight from his pioneering YAP work with Peter Block and John McKnight. A key to the program is pairing the young person with an advocate from the same zip code to co-develop and execute a plan that brings in community resources.

The first year of the county’s program saw a 44 percent reduction in crime, which has been sustained. The county has since had two decades of the lowest commitment rates to the juvenile justice department. Ivory is now Senior Executive Officer and National Director of Program Development of Youth Advocate Programs (YAP), Inc., which runs in 24 states.

Watch:

In this video:

  • Guiding principles of the program [7-9:30]
  • Who is an advocate? [10:30-12:30]
  • What about community safety? [15-16]
  • Meeting with gang leaders [25:30-28:40]
  • Consistency and hope [58-59:30]

Quotes

“We like to say that the approach is to do for, do with, cheer on, and then move out so that they can take care for themselves. We’re not interested in fostering dependency or for them to be with us long periods of time.” – Gary Ivory

“It’s a relationship-based model based on attachment theory. If we have a very positive relationship with these families, they’re much more likely to take ownership of whatever issues are going on with them.” – Gary Ivory

“You’re not in the medical model of, ‘We are the knowledgeable people, and this kid is the problem,’ but you’re saying, ‘The community is our resource base. The home is the center of our work.’ That’s a real invention.” – John McKnight

Resources:

Photo by Brandi Ibrao on Unsplash

 

 

Full Transcript

For ten years following the 2010 publication of their book The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods, John and Peter hosted conversations with neighborhood activists on their community-building work.  All their ideas are still at work and continue to be influential for anyone engaged in creating the future in the present. The transcript here has been edited for length and clarity.

Reconnecting Juvenile Offenders and Their Communities: Conversation with Gary Ivory

 

January 16, 2019

 

John McKnight: I want to welcome everybody and introduce Gary to the rest of you. There’s a history that’s very important for us to know, and that was a long time ago, I think in the 1960s or 70s. In Massachusetts they hired as the director of juvenile corrections a man named Jerry Miller. He was perhaps the most innovative public servant that I’ve ever known. I want to recommend a book that describes what he did. It’s called Last One Over the Wall by Dr. Jerome Miller. If you want to read what it really means to be a radical in public service, I can’t recommend any book as highly as that one.

What he is best known for was that there were, I think, 11 reformatories in Massachusetts. They were horrendous places. He took over, tried to reform them, decided you couldn’t reform them, and then developed a method by which he let all of the kids who were in reformatories out of the reformatories and got them connected into community life. It was, I think, the most amazingly creative and effective public action in the corrections/human service world that I’ve ever seen, and that initiative took on more and more forms and more and more people were involved.

One of the great heirs of Jerry Miller’s initiative is with us today, and I can’t wait for him to help us know how they’ve taken that beginning and developed it into what may be the most effective way of dealing with young people about whom other people say, “We want to put them away.”

Gary, I want to welcome you, and I wonder if you could pick up the story and tell us how you operate today in Tarrant County.

Gary Ivory: Let me begin with my start with Youth Advocate Programs (YAP) in 1990. Tom Jeffers took on the mantle of Jerry Miller and then later on it was Jeff Fleischer, currently our CEO, who started doing work in Tarrant County, Texas, in 1992. At that time, the county chief probation officer, Carey Cockerel, had received an offer from then-governor Ann Richards to invest in community-based alternatives. He looked around the country and found YAP. At that time, I was in New Jersey. I was a chaplain at the time and had started working with YAP.

Then I moved back to my home state of Texas. Tarrant County, at the time, had one of the highest homicide juvenile crime rates in the country. Gangs had overtaken many of the neighborhoods, especially in southeast Tarrant County. There were very high commitment rates to the state correctional institution called at that time the Texas Youth Commission, which is now called the Texas Juvenile Justice Department. They brought us in to do work in some of the areas of Tarrant County where the mail was not even being delivered because some of those neighborhoods were so violent.

I would first like to share some of the principles that guided our philosophy then and guide us today in the 24 states that we’re working in. First, and this was shaped by you, John, I just want to acknowledge, by the work that you had done. One of my favorite works of yours is The Careless Society.

Some of those guiding principles are the following. First, having a neighborhood-based recruitment of residents. We call them advocates. But these are people who really are from the neighborhoods where  the young people live who were being referred to the Juvenile Justice Department. We hire people from those same neighborhoods. In fact, we had a mandate that we wouldn’t hire an advocate unless they were from the same neighborhood where the kids who were being referred to the probation department came from. We referred to that as zip-code recruitment.

The other thing we refuse to do is deny any supportive services to any young person. We call that a No Refusal Policy. It’s simply saying that everybody, regardless of history of offense, should be given an opportunity to thrive in their own neighborhoods and not have to be removed and placed in a correctional setting.

Another principle was a non-judgmental approach, a non-judgmental stance, which was to say that everybody has –– and this, John, comes out of your work  –– has gifts, talents, strengths, and it’s our job to find those gift, talents, and strengths and link them to existing, indigenous institutions within our neighborhoods, faith-based communities, neighborhood associations, places like that.

Then we believe in what we simply call “not giving up.” Meaning that we wanted to hire people that simply wouldn’t give up on young people. So, we targeted the neighborhoods where the most referrals to the Juvenile Justice Department were coming from. We targeted areas called Stop Six Poly, which were where most of the crime was happening. We hired advocates from them, and we trained them in the model we referred to as Wraparound Advocacy, meaning we are literally going to wrap support around them, that we weren’t going to do service provision as is traditionally done but we were going to  do community mobilization as well and mobilize the community, the faith community, and all the other institutions around them. If we have time, we’ll talk a little bit more about that.

We started in 1992, and after the first year of working with about 100 young people, there was a 44% reduction in the number of young people who were committed to the Texas Juvenile Justice Department. We know that a lot of that had to do with the interventions that we were doing. By hiring community residents, training them to work with the young people that were labeled the highest risk offenders, working with them and their families and hiring people from the same neighborhoods, same zip codes, there was a big impact on their lives and we helped to transform not just the lives of the young people but even helped to transform the lives of the advocates.

One of the questions I get asked a lot is, “What is the credential of the advocates, these community residents, these people that live in the neighborhoods?” I always like to say that we hire people with a GED to a PhD. The credentials that we’re looking for are compassion, unconditional love, forgiveness, self-forgiveness, and forgiveness of others, the willingness to not judge people based upon their history or their offenses or any of those kinds of labels. We’re much more interested in those credentials than we are in any credential that one can get from an academic institution.

We hired them, we trained them, we connected them with these young people and their families. John, you referred to them as community guides. I like that term. We just simply call them advocates. They work with the young people anywhere from 5, 10, 15, or more hours a week. It’s whatever’s needed at any given time. We like to say that the approach is to do for, do with, and then cheer on and move out so that they can take care for themselves. We’re not interested in fostering dependency or for them to be with us for long periods of time. As soon as they’re able to solve their own problems, then we’re ready for them to move on.

The advocates are change agents. They’re people who care about the community so that when violence happens in their community, it impacts them as well. They’re not outside the community. They have a stake. They know the needs of their particular communities.

One of the things that we like to say to refer to the people that work for us –– especially the program directors, the people that lead the work of the recruitment of the advocates and the supervision of the program –– is that they’re wizards. That’s a term we get from Marty Beyer, a psychologist who wrote an article many years ago titled “First You Find a Wizard.” We think that the wizards really lie within the context of neighborhoods, that they have all of the caring and the gifts and talents that we need to solve the most complex problems.

I shared with you that we experienced a 44% reduction in crime. That has been sustained over time to keep young people out of correctional placement. In fact, Tarrant County, for over 20 years, has had the lowest commitment rates to the Texas Juvenile Justice Department in the state, which simply means that we’re solving problems in the neighborhoods versus committing them to correctional institutions.

There’s also a cost savings or cost benefit to that in that  public resources are being utilized to help to support young people and families versus doing what we know ’is ineffective, which is saying, “We’re going to commit them,” and then they go from the juvenile system to the adult system. Then it becomes multi-generational, and so we incapacitate neighborhoods. We know that neighborhood incapacitation through arrest, incarceration, long-term confinement does not work, so this is a way for us to address that.

There’s also the notion  that many of you have probably heard of: million dollar blocks. I think it’s Todd Clear who’s done work around that idea, that there are several blocks around this country where there are literally a million dollars or more in public dollars –– federal, state, and local –– that go towards incarceration, confinement, and a lot of other ways to remedy social problems that could be remedied if we utilized a different approach. We know that this works.

The question that I get asked a lot is, ” How do you recruit these advocates, these wizards, these neighborhood residents? Where do they come from? Can they pass a background check? Do they do the work that a person who’s a therapist or a clinician can do?”

My response is always that in every neighborhood –– whether urban, rural, suburban, ex-urban –– there are people that are committed to caring for and supporting young people within their communities. With the right training, the right skill building, the right support, they can help to address those needs without relying upon incarceration, and we can do this without jeopardizing community safety. That’s the next question I get asked. Not only how can we hire them from within the communities, but how can we do this work without jeopardizing community safety? I’ll say this: In all the years that we’ve done this work in Tarrant County, and many other places around the country, we’ve never had a case where a young person has committed a heinous offense that’s been on the front page of a paper because they weren’t confined. So, I think that answers that question about community safety.

With that, I’ll be happy to answer any questions.

John: Gary, one of the things that I wonder about is who finances you? I know that the Youth Advocate Program is in, how many, 20 some states? What’s the usual source of the financing for this kind of activity?

Gary: Great question. The Tarrant County model was initially funded by the governor’s office with what they call Community Corrections Dollars. Say, we don’t want young people to come to our state correctional facilities. We’d rather for them to be treated, supported, worked with in their neighborhoods and communities. It’s cheaper. It’s more effective to do it that way, so that’s initially how it was funded. Then eventually county commissioners, some people call them county supervisors in other states, began to expand it. Then the governor’s office, through the Texas Juvenile Justice Department, also helped to provide some seed funding for this type of initiative because they find it’s very effective and it’s cost effective, and we’re employing people from the neighborhoods to do the work. I think that’s very compelling to be able to do that.

Typically, we’re funded by county government, sometimes local governments, very little federal funding. But it is primarily what we call redirection. Redirecting money from correctional, out-of-home placement or residential placement, back to working with people in their homes, in their neighborhoods. It’s safer. It’s cheaper, and it’s just more effective. So typically, it’s state and local governments who found a way to fund it.

In a lot of places we’ll say, “How are you working with young people in your community? Are you using group homes? Are you using treatment facilities or correctional placements?” We will make a compelling case that we can work with them cheaper at home, in the community, utilizing community residents  with better outcomes.” We’ve seen that time and time again.

Peter Block: One, it’s stunning that anybody would ever say“” no to you. It’s amazing. I think, why isn’t this in every neighborhood? Part of it is, nobody considers this a news story. The news consumes itself with violence and all that, but it does not consider saving a life worthy of news unless a fireman does it at the top of a ladder. It reminds me of the whole restorative justice movement. Mike Butler is the police chief in Longmont, Colorado, and he’s got about 2,600 citizens that he’s kept out of the judicial system through the restorative process. There’s a walking school bus movement in the country where neighbors walk children to school at any hour and keep them safe. This approach of yours is truly radical. Beautiful. I’m just touched by the way you talk about it and the commitment of what you’re doing.

I’m interested in what you said about, “We train the wizards.” I imagine you find the wizards by any means necessary, in the street and church and the coffee shop. You’re never not looking for a wizard.

Gary: That’s right, always. Yes.

Peter: I’m interested in the structure of the training. What does it look like? It also reminds me of the sponsorship in AA. In a sense you could say that people who recover from alcoholism or drug addiction can’t do without what they call a sponsor.

Gary: Thank you for that, Peter. Just a couple of things about the training. I would say that we train, support, and coach, which is a little bit different. I think we do more supporting than we do anything else. In Tarrant County, for example, we would hire people, based on those credentials I mentioned, which has nothing to do with education-

Peter: I love that.

Gary: We were really interested in getting people who cared deeply about their neighborhood. What we found is that they themselves often may have a crisis going on in their lives. Sometimes those crises may have been related to their children or grandchildren or they themselves were in recovery or had a substance use issue.

I’ll give you an example. We hired some parents who were saying, “We want to stop violence within our apartment complex.” I’ll never forget hiring a woman whose son was in a gang. She herself had substance abuse issues, but she was a great organizer within their apartment complex. Everybody respected her. Everybody trusted her. So we just said to her, “What if, every week, we gave you a little bit of money just to pay for food, and we help you to get with other parents and support them around their needs. You all come up with the agenda. You all come up with what your needs are, and we’ll support you.”

We supported her through that, but through that process she became an advocate. We paid her, and we believe in that, which is giving people a livable wage. We supported her. She had some substance use needs. We helped her to get into a place, inpatient for a while. She came back out, did great for six or nine months. She went back into inpatient for a while. We supported her while she was in inpatient. She came back. We supported her son to live with the grandparents. We did a wraparound plan for them to live with the grandparents. I would say that’s an example of how the support to the wizards is so important and vital.

There are some training components, but it’s not the traditional thing about boundaries. A lot of traditional programs’ approach is to say, “You can’t.”

Peter: I know. That’s the easiest thing in the world. Set boundaries, for some who hit bottom, consequences. Correct the line in a community world.

Gary: Yeah, and the way we look at that is that in the relationship between the advocate and that family, there are no boundaries. There are some basic ethical considerations, , but we’re not saying, “Don’t get involved in the family matters.” If they’re having a dinner on a weekday and they want us to attend, we’re going to attend. Often, we were going to homes where the windows had been shot out by gangs. We had a direct line to the window installation company because all the windows had been shot out in almost every home. I called them up to have the windows put back in. I’d get the door fixed or some basic things like that while we’re sitting down at a table talking with them about what’s going on. It’s amazing what families will tell you.

We do some training, but it’s not the traditional type. Rutgers University certifies our advocates, but we do some of that too. Sometimes government agencies want to be in on some of that activity, but we don’t do the traditional type thing, Peter, that you mentioned. It’s just a relationship-based model based on attachment theory, which is, if we have a very positive relationship with these families, they’re much more likely to take ownership of whatever issues are going on with them. They’re willing to make the changes that they themselves want to make in the first place, but so often the system comes down with a hammer if you violate certain conditions. We try to move those obstacles so that they can thrive.

John: I read an article in which you were talking about how you have approached, in the neighborhood, the gangs themselves. Can you say a few words about that?

Gary: I didn’t have any experience with that when I moved into Tarrant County in 1992. Gangs were very pervasive there, and one of the things that I started doing was talking to young people on the weekends. We started seeing that they were primarily African-American and Latino gang–involved young people: Bloods, Cripps, Latin Kings, all kind of gangs. I said, “Why don’t we do a retreat where we sit down with you all over a weekend and talk about what you all need to stop some of this violence?”

Then I started meeting with some of the leaders of the gangs, and they, themselves, most of them were on probation or parole. They were 25, 30, 40 years old, and I sat down with them and said, “Would you give us permission to work with … ?” And some people thought this was controversial. I didn’t. So I asked, :”ould you give us permission to work with these young people? Because you all are calling the shots, and we don’t want them to be incarcerated long term.”

They gave us permission, and we worked with them. We talked to them. We met with the judges who had power over them, in a sense. We did several retreats with them. Then we took them to places around the country. We took them to Memphis because most of them were African-American\ and, Latino. We took some of them to Memphis and to the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta because we wanted them to understand the cultural reasons that you shouldn’t use violence as a means to achieve your goals.

We did a number of things like that. We always involved residents of the community. Whenever we did the tour to Atlanta and all those other places, we had about 15 community members. They were just community members who cared about their kids. They went along with us because they were the ones, when we came back to Tarrant County after these trips, who would be there. They had a stake. They weren’t outsiders. They were just community residents who cared about the young people in their communities.

Our thing was not to say, “Let’s remove these gang members from the neighborhoods.” It was, “Let’s talk with them. Let’s ask them what they need.” And then we started saying, “We need jobs.” We started getting them, one by one, jobs when we could. A lot of people stepped up to the plate, but it’s the same philosophy: What do you need? How can we help you? What can we work on together? Then once you’re stable, how can you give back to the community?

We asked those kinds of questions to people. It’s very empowering because we’re not simply saying to you, “If you don’t do this, then here’s a consequence.” It’s more, “How can we help you?” whether you’re a gang member or whatever. We’re starting to work now with a lot of young people that have been sex trafficked, so it’s the same questions that we ask. We find it very empowering.

Peter: Is addiction within the realm of what you deal with now in these neighborhoods?

Gary: A huge part of what we deal with is around addiction, and in other places as well. One of the primary things that we do is use a lot of peer support. We hire people that themselves are in recovery or who have had a family member who’s in recovery. We hire them to be that peer support to a person who may have a substance-use need. It’s very, very powerful to be able to do that. We’re finding success with that.

Peter: Do you have a way of thinking about why the opioid and other addictions have exploded on us on the last 5 or 10 years? How do you think about that?

Gary: A couple of ways we think about it. We have an expert –– her name’s Virginia Hoff –– who’s really worked with us a lot on this. We are seeing, of course, the lack of jobs in many areas, so a sense of hopelessness is a result of that, and that has a lot to do with it. We’ve also seen that a lot of young people who experiment with drugs oftentimes find themselves addicted. We find that for a lot of the young people who’ve been trafficked, it causes trauma. So, we’re addressing addiction and trafficking through a trauma lens because there’s a direct correlation there.

We know that a lot of it has to do with employment, so a big part of what we do is we subsidize a lot of employment because we know that you need to have wages. We subsidize those wages. That has a big impact. Then we use other strategies that we know have been very helpful in helping us to look at the stages of change, like where people are in the recovery process. We utilize that, but the key thing is that we utilize  the residents themselves who have walked the walk and talked the talk and can engage them.

To me, engagement is critical. There’s a lot out there about how you engage residents. How do you engage people who maybe need assistance? Our thing is it’s a relationship-based approach, and once you have that relationship, it’s amazing the change that can occur.

Peter: It’s kind of the work of a church, isn’t it? Their suffering is a spiritual question also.

Gary: That’s right. No doubt about it.

John: Gary, you talked about intentionally wanting to engage in ways that don’t create dependence. Could you say a few words about that, because it seems to me that in the service and health world, one of the biggest problems comes from the idea  that “I’m helping you, but in the end, you’re a dependency of me.” How do you handle that?

Gary: There are a few different ways that we handle that. First of all, from day one, we tell the families and the young people that, “We are going to only be here a short period of time in your life to support you. We want to begin the discharge process, the graduation, whatever, from day one. We want to plan for that.” We talk about that at the beginning. We think that’s very important to have that conversation from day one.

Secondly, in the plan that we develop with them, we don’t develop the plan. They co-develop the plan. We say they’re coauthors of the plan. The plan has a date by which we say that we’re not going to be involved in a formal way. We’ll always support. Years later, we stay engaged with them, young people that we worked with 20 something years ago. That occurs on an informal basis. But formally, it’s only going to be four to six months. “Here’s a plan. You co-author a plan.” That’s the second way we approach it: They co-author the plan. It has a date that says when services are going to formally end, and they’re aware of that. We’re not fostering dependency.

The third thing that we want to build into our planning process, and throughout what we call the length of stay, is to link them with many resources. We always say there are formal resources, or things you pay for. We also want to get those informal resources, both people and institutions, that we can link them to that can help to support them once our formal services have ended, because if not –– John, as you well know –– there is what we call the cliff effect. They kind of go off the cliff because they’ve been so dependent on us for resources, so we begin that conversation from day one.

John: That’s wonderful. Becky, are there people wanting to talk to Gary?

Becky Robinson: Mac in Cincinnati wants to join us

Mac (caller): I really appreciate your work. I’m thinking also of another program that’s gotten a lot of publicity, Homeboy Industries, Homegirl Industries, Boyle Heights in LA, Greg Boyle, and so on. I’m inspired by this conversation. I’m in Cincinnati. We’re thinking about our economy and the need to develop in an asset-based way more economic activity for people to get access to, in a training business kind of way. Homeboy is also related to trauma care, very relational trauma care work is being done there. I’m just wondering if you had anything from your experience to comment further on.

Gary: Yes. First of all, I admire Father Greg Boyle and the work of Homeboy and Homegirl Industries and what they’re doing. Every time I’m in the LAX airport, I go by the store there and intentionally buy food to support what they do. To me, their work is very principle-driven as well, much like ours. We have a shared philosophy about being relationship based and practicing unconditional caring and those kinds of things.

I think some of the things that they’ve done, in addition to things like we’ve done,’ is work from a very entrepreneurial model so they create a lot of economic opportunities and a lot of businesses that have employed people. We use a lot of subsidized employment. They in turn create businesses that have created jobs but have also helped to deal and address trauma and those types of issues. Their work is facility based in that people come to them, and they do groups and things like that. I think their work is admirable.

We do some of those approaches. We’re not as facility based. We’re much more home based. We always tell the advocates, “We want you to be where the young people are, and going out and mediating when needed, like in gang conflict, to prevent it from happening.” If you have a relationship with a young person who’s engaged in a gang, we always used to say, “We don’t want you to focus on extrication, getting them out of the gang. They may have that identity as far as being in a gang.” The key thing we don’t want them doing is violent things and doing things that are anti-social and things that are going to hurt them and hurt their employment prospects –– things like that. Now we don’t want them associated with gangs. I need to be clear about that, but that’s not the first conversation we have. The first thing we do is develop a plan with them that will address their unique needs and circumstances.

I love the model, the approach. Theirs is more facility based than ours is. They create economic opportunities. We’re starting to do this in the Baltimore/DC area, where we’re doing matched savings accounts and things like that so that when they leave us, they have a financial asset. ’…We work with a group in Maryland, and what they do is like an individual development account. When young people first come to us, we put money into a savings account for them. When they leave, they may have $1,000 that they can use to buy a car, go to a vocational school, and then we’ll match that through a scholarship. All they have to do is write a couple of pages of an essay, not write a thesis, just a couple pages of an essay. We’ll give them $1,000, and we find those kinds of things are very, very powerful to young people. They’re willing to make very different decisions about their future simply based upon the idea that, “I have a stake. I have a future. I have some opportunities.” They now see beyond the limitations of their own neighborhood.

Peter: That’s just amazing. So many parallels, the financial independence initiatives, families logging what they spend, and they spend it better. There’s renter equity, where if you take care of the place you’re staying, at the end of five years you have $5,000 from participating in maintenance and upkeep of the place. It’s such a beautiful family-centered way of thinking, and it all begins with your principles which say, “We’ll stay with you forever.” The solution lies within the residents, and we’re only going to use residents as advocates for residents. That’s just so powerful. The idea also that you would ask permission of a gang leader: “Will you give us permission to work with some of your gang people? We’re not going to talk them out of it, but we just want to help them stay out of jail.”

Gary: Right, and the reason we use that terminology is sometimes some people, law enforcement, will say to me, “Why are we asking a gang member for permission?” Well, we also don’t want the young people to be unsafe, and we don’t want our advocates to be unsafe. If they’re on the block selling drugs or doing whatever they’re doing, what we’ve found is that we’ll see them, and they’re going to be back there. They’ll go to detention, come back on the block, go back to detention, come back on the block, and do whatever they’re doing. We’re saying, “If we ask permission and we can really begin to work with them, that gives us an opportunity to have the advocates go in there and really help these young people.

Also, when we get permission, it gives us the authority to go in and not put people’s lives in jeopardy, their safety in jeopardy, because that is real. We work with, again, some young people who’ve been trafficked, and there have been articles written about how a lot of people that used to be in the drug distribution business now are getting into human trafficking and sex trafficking because they say it’s more profitable. When we work with these young men and women, sometimes our advocates will get threatened by their pimps because they’re saying, “They made $3,000 a day for us, and you’re going to take them off the streets.” We do that partly for safety reasons and partly just to buy in so we can get in there and do the kind of work that we need to do.

Peter: You’re also creating an alternative to reform. John said that Jerry Miller tried reform for several years and found that it was a false promise. You cannot reform institutions based on other principles.

What you’re doing is a renewing and reconstruction and reaffirming approach. If people are interested in reform, you’re giving them another path. It’s just stunning, powerful.

John: I would add that you see individuals as part of a family. You’re not in the medical modelthat says, “We are the knowledgeable people, and this kid is the problem.” Instead you’re saying, “The community is our resource base. The home is the center of our work.” That’s a real invention. That happens so rarely.

Gary: What I found so often is that most judges involved in this process –– whether on the civil or criminal or family court side ––’ are very open to this approach, to these principles, because they understand that what they’re doing often doesn’t work. ’Their primary interest is community safety at the end of the day.

When I talk to the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges and see all these judges, they’re very interested because they know that the people keep reappearing before their bench and what is happening oftentimes is not working. They’re interested in these types of alternatives as long as you can assure some semblance of safety.

What I always say is that people have hidden behind this notion of safety to be able to invest billions in the prison industrial complex. They say, “We can’t keep communities safe, and so we need to do something different. We need to incarcerate our way out of the problem.” We say, “Let’s take safety off the table, because we know how to keep kids safe, and we know how to keep neighborhoods safe. Let’s talk about how we help them address the other needs. Let’s take safety off the table.”

Peter: You’re right that safety is a beautiful smokescreen.

It can justify anything. Just like jobs can justify the most cruel developments you can imagine, scraping the land, scraping the neighborhood on the pretext of creating jobs. I love the thought of getting people out from behind the mask of job creation and safety.

Gary: In many places, it’s all about who has a stronger voice. Is it the correctional officers or the community residents? There’s a tug between them. People said to me in many states, “I want to do what you’re talking about, but the elected officials are not paid, but they are getting supported. The people that donated in their campaigns are the correctional folks sometimes rather than the residents.” It’s that kind of politics we deal with.

Peter: I think those two things, jobs and safety, are always the argument for authoritarian leadership.

Gary: Well said, very well said. Yeah, I agree.

John: Gary, you mentioned judges. My memory is that, initially, a lot of the work of the Youth Advocates Programs was financed through the judicial circuits. Actually, the judges themselves had money that they invested in your work. Is that right?

Gary: That is correct. In fact, in Tarrant County, Judge Scott Moore, who has since passed away but was a great judge, was one of the biggest champions for this type of approach. Same thing in Toledo, Ohio, and several other places around the country: Judges have oftentimes been the biggest champions of this philosophy.

John: And that’s a good place for people who are interested in this kind of approach to touch down. Within the criminal justice system it may be that judges are the most useful contacts of all because they see they’re administering failure every day. You give them a little chance and hope for success.

Gary:  I have a lot of hope in success and, in fact, district attorneys or prosecuting attorneys in many places are beginning to look at these types of approaches. They have units that deal a lot of things that adhere to some of the principles that we’re talking about.

Peter: Let me ask, Gary, how do you work with churches? So many people in the church now are looking for ways to leave the building, make a difference. I’d like to hear a little about how you connect, what’s it doing for the churches in these neighborhoods, because they are probably the most powerful institution.

Gary: Yes, they are. Great question. So, there are a few ways we interface and interact and engage churches. In fact, I was on a call last week with people in St. Louis, and the gentleman I was talking to is a faith-based leader. We oftentimes have conversations with the faith community. I really understand that. I’m a clergy myself.

A few ways we engage churches are, one, we recruit advocates from the faith community because that’s one of the best recruiting grounds to recruit the wizards. There are a lot of wizards in pews, and so we recruit wizards from the pews.

The second way is that if there are needs to be met, what we find is that the problem becomes much more digestible and people are more willing to help if you partialize it. When we do this planning process with families –– whether they are in recovery or sex trafficked or gang involved or whatever –– we will say, “Who are the go-to people that you can go to in a crisis? What are the places that you like to go to?” In a trauma-informed way we don’t ask, “What’s wrong with you?” “What happened to you?” and those kind of questions. A lot of that leads us to the church. It’s who you go to in a crisis, it’s a lot of faith-family friends for a lot of people, not everybody, but a lot of people. So we will have that as part of the plan.

Then the third way we do that is to have a more formal connection. In Tarrant County, we have a church that gives us money every year and some of their people, some of their deacons and elders, work with us as advocates. They’re employees as well as people who participate in faith life, in the church life. We engage very, very closely with church organizations.

YAP is not a faith-based institution, but we engage very, very closely with churches because that’s where the resources are, that’s where the people are, and there’s also just tremendous resource in communities.

Peter: It’s also a place where the principles already reside. If they only acted on them. This is wonderful. I think we’re near the end, aren’t we Becky?

Becky: We have a question from Michelle who was hoping that Gary could share more specific information about the work that you do with kids who are willing to go back to detention and back to the street. Those ones that seem to be just back in and out all the time.

Gary: We call it detention alternatives where a young person’s arrested, apprehended. They go to detention, secure detention. A judge or the detention staff release them, and they release them oftentimes to us and say, “Come pick them up at detention.” Then we’ll begin the planning process that I shared with you. We’ll match them with an advocate, see them several times a week, that kind of thing. They’ll reappear before the court, but what we’re looking at doing is to make sure, first of all, that those court order conditions are being addressed, because if you don’t address that, courts have a lot of power to intervene. So, we’re not interested in kids getting removed because they violated something that the judge told them not to do.

For example, don’t associate with other peers in your neighborhood who have criminal histories. Well, sometimes, that’s pretty hard to do because a lot of their peers may themselves have background issues. We find that once we engage them, build that relationship, see them several times a week, develop a plan, and they have a voice and choice in the plan, it tends to address those issues, and we don’t see them going through that revolving door through the system. Very little do we see that.

What we have found is that we know how to keep people out of institutions, out of the four walls of a detention center or correctional facility. And research supports this: About 84% of young people once they get involved in this type of model –– and to me it’s not just a program because these principles can be implemented anywhere, anyplace; there are other people that can do this philosophy and this approach –– stay out of the correctional system.

But sometimes the arrest rates are high simply because once you have been arrested in a certain neighborhood, and there’s zero tolerance in that neighborhood, your likelihood of being re-arrested is very high. So sometimes arrest is not the best indicator of progress for some of these young people. There are other measures about their well-being that may not get reflected in arrest statistics, but we do find that once we engage them –– whether it’s detention alternative or they have already been adjudicated delinquent or whether they’re coming out of a correctional institution –– this philosophy, those questions and matching them with residents who’ve been trained in supporting those residents, really does work. It really works.

Caller: I wanted to draw a connection between disability and race. For many disabled people, they can understand interpersonal discrimination and how to deal with that and there are a number of strategies. Try this, try that. The real battle for disabled people, they instigate a lot of hopelessness. It’s not interpersonal discrimination but systemic discrimination. No matter what you do, the bureaucracies don’t give you a way out.

I’m wondering when you’re working with the kids and the young adults that you work with, how do you keep them hopeful in the face of dealing with the day-to-day systemic discrimination, especially in this current political climate that seems to be going backwards rather than forwards?

Gary: Thank you for that. That’s a great question. First, this is a very difficult time. It’s just very difficult for many, if not most. But let me say a couple of things from my experience. We do a lot of work in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Ohio, and other places with young people, young adults, or their parents that have developmental/intellectual  disabilities. I would say, first, that I have found that the young adults we work with, and even families, are some of the most resilient people I’ve ever seen. Now resiliency and hopefulness are not the same thing, but they’re very resilient, and I think a lot of times they come out more hopeful. We oftentimes ask, “What happened to you? What are things that you’ve overcome in your life?” –– things like that –– and I’m amazed at how they remain hopeful in spite of those circumstances.

When we develop these plans, we find that people are looking for not just hope but they’re looking for commitment –– people that have consistency in their lives and that do what they say they’re going to do. One of the first things they in training is say, “You have to be consistent, regardless of your own personal challenges or whatever. Whoever you’re supporting –– whether it’s a person with intellectual disability, developmental disability, whatever the need may be –– you have to be consistent.”

I always say, “The reason we call them advocates is because much of what we do is advocate with the people that we’re supporting.” Sometimes that means we’re challenging systems, whether it’s around a housing issue or whether it’s around discrimination. I sometimes met with police chiefs in different places based upon police conduct or misconduct. We’re constantly pushing the envelope on issues, and that gives people a sense of hope when they know that they have somebody advocating for and with them on their behalf. That gives them a spirit of hope.