Part II: Putting the Pieces Together: The Pico Collaborative is Born

By Teresa Rochester

On June 29, 1999, dozens of young people, along with Oscar de la Torre and Manuel "Manny" Lares, filled the City Council Chambers. They had come to urge City officials to earmark money for programs aimed at giving young people an alternative to gang life.

The cause was a timely one. Nine months earlier, in the course of little more than two weeks, four young Latino men had been killed in gang-related shootings.

"Nobody has the answer to youth violence except the youth," de la Torre, the head of the recently formed Proyecto Adelante, told the Council, " but no one listens to them because they are not in positions of power."

This time, however, those in power did listen. The City Council set aside $350,000 for the program and directed staff to begin searching for applicants with proposals.

"They responded right away," de la Torre said. "The City Council has the right intention."

Following the vote, de la Torre approached Ed Bell, who also had formed an organization -- Parachute Program -- that offered at risk youth alternatives to gangs. Why not apply for the grant together? the former Santa Monica High School counselor suggested. Bell's initial response was no.

But Bell, who works in the City's Water Department, changed his mind after discussing the offer with Dr. Sylvia Rosseau, Santa Monica High School's popular former principal, as well as with members of his fledgling group's board of directors.

When the City held a question-and-answer networking meeting for prospective grant applicants and required them to attend one of two, two-day grant-writing workshops conducted by The Grantmanship Center, De la Torre, Bell and Lares were there.

Of the 30 groups participating in the workshops, only five submitted proposals to the City by its Sept. 13, 1999 deadline. They were Lares' Santa Monica Barrios Unidos, Bell and de la Torre's Parachute Program/Proyecto Aadelante Alliance, Break the Cycle, FAME (Santa Monica Redevelopment Corporation) and the National Conference for Community and Justice (NCCJ).

"Through that process many of the established organizations decided not to compete with some of the grassroots organizations, so we didn't get proposals from established organizations," said Julie Rusk, director of the City's Human Services Division, noting that the request for proposal process was unique. "People intentionally decided not to apply."

A rigorous evaluation process awaited those that did apply. The City hired seven young people between the ages of 16 and 20 to review the proposals. For two months, at nights and on weekends, between homework and jobs, the young people pored over the proposals. With help from The Grantmanship Center, they focused on the proposals' effectiveness and their ability to address youth needs.

One of the youth evaluators, who analyzes programs professionally and asked not to be identified, said the group also looked at whether or not the applicants were sincere or just seeking City money.

"Knowing that Santa Monica had been plagued with violence on so many levels … I was looking for someone who could bring together the communities," the youth evaluator said.

"From a technical aspect I wanted to know were the goals realistic? Did the goals seem realistic and tangible? The program that I particularly liked did not have enough of a technical background in starting up programs."

The seven-member group was torn between the proposals from two groups -- the Alliance and Santa Monica Barrios Unidos. In the end, the youth evaluators and City staffed agreed: the fledgling Parachute Program/Proyecto Adelante Alliance and Santa Monica Barrios Unidos were a perfect match to serve the older youth of the Pico Neighborhood.

But the City would place one condition -- the groups would have to work together if they wanted the funding. "They (the youth evaluators) said, 'Look if the adults in the community can't work together, then how do we work together?" Rusk recalled.

"They held out hope that they could work together," Rusk said. "They really wanted them to pull together. That was a really strong perspective. We really thought the collaborative working together would be difficult, but it was such a strong desire."

In their recommendation to the City Council, staff wrote that the two groups - Barrios Unidos and Parachute Program/Proyecto Adelante Alliance - did the most to involve youth in designing the programs, showed the strongest ability to build partnerships and demonstrated a knowledge of those they needed to reach.

The proposals called for creating a youth-designed drop in center, providing alternatives to violence through education, developing leadership, building cultural awareness and employing the youth as program staff or in other career track jobs.

Under the leadership of the three men, the program would be different from other failed efforts. This time, the programs would be run by those who grew up in the neighborhood they would be serving and were the products of earlier programs.

"Combined they form a new coalition of community leaders who live or grew up in the Pico Neighborhood," staff wrote. "They offer expertise in reaching youth and young adults who are most at risk of unemployment, teen pregnancy and behaviors that may lead to criminal activities."

In January 2000 the City Council unanimously agreed with staff, granting the newly formed collaborative a $350,000 five-month planning grant. Of the total, $105,500 was budgeted to hire Community Partners, a non-profit organization that would provide the initial infrastructure for the collaborative, as well as technical assistance in developing its program plans and budgets.

In addition, Community Partners would serve as the collaborative's fiscal receiver, since Proyecto Adelante and Parachute Program lacked official non-profit status. The grant also included $98,5000 to improve facilities and buy equipment.

But while the creation of the Pico Collaborative looked good on paper, concerns had already surfaced weeks before the council's approval. In its report, staff wrote that the applicants had concerns that the City's timeline for planning their proposals did not allow sufficient time to strengthen partnerships or completely address the RFP.

The City and youth evaluators had agreed that the proposals exhibited weaknesses. They were especially concerned that the collaborative may not have been ready to deliver services and that the participants didn't fully understand how to put together a program budget and lacked the experience needed to administer finances and develop an organization.

All of these concerns would come back to haunt the collaborative. A year after the council's vote to award the grant, a visibly angry de la Torre said that from the beginning everyone questioned the effectiveness of the collaboration.

"When we talk about a forced collaborative the City said you have to work together," de la Torre said. "I could see the hesitation in everyone's eyes but the carrot was there in front of us. It was almost like setting us up to fail.

"The hesitation comes from people having their own self-interest. You want to know what it is? People aren't used to working together. There's also racial tension in this community. There's a lot of reasons."

"I think things from the very beginning were rocky," said Lares. "The sophistication of this type of relationship was underestimated. The City was trying to forge relationships that don't happen naturally. That dynamic worked people into a type of ultimatum-type situation."

If the key participants were finding it difficult to work together, the youth they were hoping to serve also were struggling to build bridges.

At a "Unity Barbecue" last June, as hamburgers and hot links sizzled on the grill, the teens playing solitaire on new Hewlett Packard computers purchased with City funds were hesitant to break the ice.

The goal of the barbecue, held in a spacious room in a Baptist church on 19th Street and Pico Boulevard, was to bring the black and brown teens in the neighborhood together for a positive experience amid growing tensions between the two groups.

At first the teenagers stayed in groups split along racial lines. Then, finally, a young black teen walked up to a Latino teen lounging over the handlebars of his "low rider" bicycle and extended his hand, breaking the mild tension that hung in the summer heat.

Tomorrow: Part III -- The Pico Collaborative Takes Its First Tentative Steps