U.S. Anti-Drug Funds Misfire, Hit Target

Virginia City Builds Youth as Assets, Not Deficits; Now They Help Run Town

Did this city rip off the U.S. Center for Substance Abuse Prevention?

In 1990, CSAP handed Hampton a five-year community partnership grant, starting at $160,000 a year, to fight drug use among the city's youth. But under intense questioning over lunch recently, Hampton community leaders admitted that they did not use the money for drug prevention programs.

"We didn't end up talking about drugs at all," said Richard Goll, a community leader who helped the city apply for the grant.

Instead, Hampton used the money to help create one of the most progressive and thorough city-wide youth empowerment programs in the country. By switching its focus from seeing youths as deficits to seeing them as assets, the city has helped its young people become so entrenched in civic life that they now alter development plans, control some city funds, and vote on many city boards and commissions.

While many communities have youth development programs and give youth a voice in civic affairs through advisory boards or programs like Maine's KIDS Consortium (wherein youths help design solutions to local problems), it would be difficult to find a place where youths play such an influential role from neighborhood groups to schools to City Hall. Consider:

-When the city decided to build a teen center at the urging of its youth, the teens told the city where the center should go — and now they're helping to design it.
-Any neighborhood organization that wants part of a $40,000 pot recently set aside by the city for youth programs will apply to the youth commission — which is made up of 20 high schoolers who decide how to divvy up the funds.
-The planning department employs two high school students as "youth planners," who conduct research and help shape policies.
-Youths essentially halted the development of a neighborhood center that they deemed inadequate and have been instrumental in overhauling plans for creating an 80-acre park.
-Youths hold voting seats on several city boards and commissions, including two of the nine seats on the Recreation Department's board of directors, and two of the 21 seats on the city's Neighborhood Commission. "A lot of cities will ask for their advice but not put them in voting positions," says Parks and Recreation Director Laurine Press.

And how is the city handling youth drug treatment? By reducing the amount of money it spends and shutting down its most successful private treatment program.

Hampton's experiment raises several questions: Why? How? And will it work?

It's the Economy

Although officially a city, Hampton is really a big seaport suburb. The landscape is marked by chain stores and restaurants, single family homes, and small apartment and office buildings.

According to Kids Count in Virginia, the average per capita income among the 139,000 residents was $18,200 in 1995. The population is about 55 percent white and 40 percent black.

For years Hampton's major industry was ship-building; but as that industry declined a couple of decades ago, so did Hampton's fortunes. Jimmy Eason saw trouble when he became mayor in 1982. "We had some statistics that none of us were happy with," he says. With one of Virginia's highest tax rates and little developable land for commercial use, "businesses were leaving and going to surrounding communities." Looking to the 21st century, Hampton saw that its future economy depended on its young.

"We looked at where the economy was going and the job skills that were going to be needed," Eason said. Kids who eeked through high school or dropped out were less likely to find jobs in ship-building and farming; the new economy would demand more skilled, techno-savvy young workers.

The trouble was that teen delinquency and crime were rising. In one incident in 1981, about 50 students were suspended for drug violations after police videotaped deals in a school parking lot.

"We'll be what our workforce allows us to be," Eason says. "For businesses who are going to stay in your community and are going to come into your community, it always gets down to can this community furnish the skilled workers that I need?"

The city gradually launched a series of initiatives aimed at improving the health, education and behavior of its young people through prenatal care, preschool programs and drug treatment. But by the late 1980s the city realized it needed more than the standard menu of programs for at-risk kids.

City leaders were concerned about "developing a permanent underclass," says Cindy Carlson, who was director of school and community programs at Alternatives, Inc., then the city's primary drug treatment provider for youth. They wanted to "make sure we were raising the kids to be a part of this workforce, rather than sucking up all of it resources" through criminal justice and remedial social services. They decided to "develop a much more strategic plan."

Hampton created a team of city officials, directors of local youth-serving agencies, business leaders, educators and parents to create a "long range development approach for kids and families," Carlson says. An unexpected boost came from CSAP, which awarded the 1990 grant even though Hampton's youth development strategy wasn't designed to reduce drug use. "We said we're dealing with youth issues," Carlson says of the grant application, and reducing drug use might be a "by-product." She recalls that Hampton's first program officer for the CSAP grant could never get the hang of what her grantee was doing.

Carlson became director of a new Hampton Coalition for Youth, which used the CSAP money to help develop four strategic initiatives: healthy families, healthy neighborhoods, youth as resources ("getting young people into the mix, helping solve problems instead of being seen as the problem"), and a public awareness campaign "focused on the importance of investing in children."

It was a long-range approach that was willing to wait years for results. Nowhere was that shift more dramatic than in the shutdown of the city's most successful private drug treatment program.

A Bold Switch

"I was Mr. Drug Treatment in this community," says Goll, executive director of Alternatives. Alternatives had been in business for 20 years, having migrated across the city line in the 1980s from neighboring Newport News. By the early '90s the agency was annually treating 180 of Hampton's 12-to-18-year-olds and winning national best practices awards.

But keeping in line with Hampton's youth development focus, Goll hired 20 youths in 1993 to determine what Hampton youth thought of his agency. The question, Goll says, was "should we stay in this business?” The answer was no.

The youths felt that Alternatives focused on a narrow, negative aspect of youth behavior. They did not rank drugs or youth crime as their top concerns. "They said, 'We're not broken. Don't try to fix us,'" Goll says. One teen drove home the point by saying, "Do you raise your daughter not to do things, or to do things?"

Goll decided that Alternatives' new mission should be to help build "a system of public/private agencies and grass-roots organizations that are about one thing, and that's the healthy development of kids." Sounds nice, but as a subsequent consultant's report for Alternatives said, "Replacing a treatment perspective with a development focus is controversial....Initiatives based primarily on the provision of 'challenging opportunities,' 'responsible roles,' and 'caring adults' are often viewed as soft and not worth of priority funding by public agencies."

Alternatives was funded almost completely by local agencies, with the biggest chunk of its $1.7 million budget coming from the Hampton-Newport News Community Service Board. In Virginia, CSBs are appointed by municipal governments to dispense local, state and federal dollars. Goll told the CSB and Mayor Eason about his plans.

"A lot of people said we were crazy, you're going to lose your funding," Goll recalls.

Today Alternatives' budget stands at $1.5 million — with the same funders as before, including the CSB, the city, the school system and United Way. (Some money comes from Coalition for Youth. Golls says people occasionally point out a potential conflict of interest between he and Carlson, who are married, but it has not been a major issue.) "So much of it is luck," Goll says. "So much of this is timing and being in position."

The luck was that City Hall already believed in youth development and didn't demand statistical proof of immediate results. "We took advantage of a mayor who was willing to be a risk-taker," says local CSB executive director Charles A. Hall.

The CSB used part of the money that it had been giving Alternatives to expand city-run treatment services. Alternatives shifted from running programs to building systems. It essentially works to inject youths into Hampton’s planning, decision-making and implementation process by training youths to be leaders, creating school and neighborhood networks, and giving youths opportunities to have an impact through activities like YouthLink, a high-tech center where youths help each other build and run web pages for kids and neighborhood organizations.

Alternatives was also instrumental in getting the planning department to do something it never would have imagined a few years ago: put two kids on staff. (See story, page 39). As a result, says Planning Director Terry O'Neill, "Our decision-making is more sensitive to what young people want and how they view their community."

Kids In The Mix

In fact, it is difficult to find any youth issue being discussed here without youths fully in the conversation.

The Youth Commission deals with a plethora of youth issues, appoints youths to other city commissions, and will review applications for the $40,000 in city grants. "There are no adults in this decision-making process," Carlson says. The grant criteria say that "projects must demonstrate that they are based on a partnership of youth and adults in their planning and implementation. Projects must clearly describe how young people are resources within the project," rather than just clients to be served.

The city's comprehensive plan for the next century, now being written, includes a "youth component" that teens helped to put together. The goal, according to the Coalition, is to provide a "substructure" within the planning process to allow youth to "positively and continuously affect the quality of life in Hampton."

-Even the Public Works Department — far off the youth services path in most towns — uses youth to help choose and shape environmental cleanup projects. "They're partners with us, as opposed to us doing something for them," says Cheryl Copper, the department's environmental relations manager.
-The police department's Youth Community Oriented Policing Effort (Y-COPE) teams with kids to help decide on projects to tackle in their neighborhoods.
-School superintendent William Cannaday uses youth committees to help craft school policies. When the schools wanted to change the absentee policy several years ago because 46 percent of all 7-to-12th graders missed more than 10 days of school, the students came up with an idea to encourage attendance. Now students who earn As and Bs and who miss only certain numbers of days each year are exempt from finals. Currently, Cannaday says, only 26 percent of the students miss more than 10 days.

One indication of how dedicated city leaders are to collaborating on youth development: Cannaday passes the Safe and Drug Free Schools money that his system receives on to Alternatives, which runs the program in the schools.

A New Attitude

As is typical of youth development, it is difficult to statistically measure the impact here. The CSB's Hall says Hampton's expenditures on juvenile treatment have been dropping, while expenditures in neighboring Newport News — which generally follows a more traditional approach to treating troubled youth — have been rising. Hall says Hampton, with about 11,000 teens, spent $3.9 million last year treating fewer than 400 youths for drugs, alcohol, and emotional and psychological problems. Newport News, with about 14,000 teens, treated nearly 1,300 kids at a cost of $15 million.

Hampton's juvenile crime, however, has not dropped. Juvenile drug arrests went from 19 in 1990 to 125 last year. Hampton's rate of delinquency intake cases rose through the mid-1990's, according to Kids Count in Virginia. The police department reports that juvenile arrests for various major crimes such as robbery, aggravated assault and larceny have slightly risen or slightly declined. The school district reports that long-term suspensions and expulsions have risen through most of the decade.

Capt. Nolan Cutler, commander of the police department's crime prevention unit, says such figures are no surprise because the city's youth population has been rising, as has crime by adults. "My gut feeling is that it's down from what it would have been" if not for the youth development effort, he says.

Cutler and others say the changes are intangible, that they can be felt in the positive activities of youth, a decline in graffiti, and what community activist Will Moffit calls "a turnaround in attitude." They believe they have laid the foundation for a healthier population of youths and young adults.

"The benefits to the police department, you can't measure them," Cutler says, referring to Y-COPE's success in bringing kids and police together. "These are kids who know police officers. They walk up to them and greet them by name. My police officers, they learn how to act with kids."

"I see a change for the better," says Donna Myers, executive director of Girls Inc. here. She says the girls she works with "are more motivated to stay on track and stay out of trouble." Myers credits not just the city, but "all of the agencies that deal with youth development," such as Girls Inc., the Boys & Girls Clubs, and the YMCA. (The traditional nationally affiliated nonprofits have done some work with the Coalition, but they have mostly continued with their own youth development programs while the city focuses on building neighborhood groups.)

It is difficult to measure the impact of getting someone like 17-year-old Nathaniel Cherry involved in Salina Street, a neighborhood group built up as part of the youth development effort. Before joining the group, Cherry says, "I was just hanging out at home." A friend convinced him to join because of the group's field trips and games. Now Cherry is on the youth commission.

"I'm not sure this really is about reducing crime," Goll says. Former mayor Eason believes youth development has been one factor in the city's recent economic growth, although it's impossible to draw a direct link. "If you have a citizenry that feels involved in the city, then there's a unity and pride that manifests itself in many ways," he says. "It's the attitude that permeates that has intangible benefits."

Eason left office last May and now runs a regional economic development group, but the community services approach marches on. The bad news is that Hampton had just the right mix of political, civic and business leaders at just the right time to make things happen. The formula is not easy to replicate.

"I'm not sure we travel," Goll says. At least not to a CSAP awards ceremony.

Resources

Hampton Coalition for Youth
22 Lincoln Street
Hampton, VA 2366
(757) 727-1380

Alternatives Inc.
2013 Cunningham Drive
Suite 104
Hampton, VA 23666-3306
(757) 838-2330

Sidebar:

U.S. Anti-Drug Funds Misfire, Hit Target: Teens Shape Planning, and The Department

Boyle, Patrick. "U.S. Anti-Drug Funds Misfire, Hit Target." Youth Today, Dec/Jan 1999, p. 1.

©2000 Youth Today. Reprinted with permission from Youth Today. All rights reserved.