Kelly's been around long enough to see various gang initiatives come and go. The walls of his seventh-floor office off the 16th Street Mall are lined floor to ceiling with awards and photos. Some of them feature Kelly with famous people like boxer Evander Holyfield, but most are photos of kids from the streets. Kelly can point to any one of them and tell a sad story. "He's dead," Kelly says. "He's dead. Peanut's gone. That's John." John called earlier that day. It was a collect call; he was in jail again.
But Kelly doesn't wish GRID ill. He's just made a decision to stay out of it and focus instead on his long-running after-school program in the Cole neighborhood. "Any efforts out there I applaud, because it's better than nothing," he says. "It's cool if you're filling voids, but in some sense, it would be nice to have the resources spread around.... I trip a little bit when the people in the trenches, doing what we do, don't have the resources."
Bryan Butler, Terrance Roberts and John Lewis of the Prodigal Son Initiative work with youth in northeast Park Hill.
Johnny Santos, an outreach worker with the Gang Rescue and Support Project, likes that GRID brings all agencies to the table.
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Roberts shares that belief but says he came to realize that it can't all be about prevention. At least not yet. "My heart is still dead set on the only way to end violence is to stop recruitment [into gangs]," he says. He has his own plan for doing so. While Crips use blue to recruit and Bloods use red, Roberts is pushing for Park Hill — and all of Denver — to adopt camouflage as its signature look. That way, kids can feel like they belong to something. "But why I wanted to come back to the table [with GRID]," he continues, "is because I do care about the men and women caught up in the system."
"Even gangsters need a hand," says Bryan Butler, one of Prodigal Son's two GRID-funded outreach workers. Butler and John Lewis, whom everyone calls Qwest, have been with Prodigal Son since January. They're still developing their roles, but they hope to work intensely with a couple dozen youth a year to help them realize that gangbanging doesn't lead to anything good.
"The thing we're strong on is mentoring," Lewis says. "It's good for them to see someone from the 'hood living a professional life. 'If I can go to school and work in television, you can, too.'" Lewis grew up in Montbello and used to work for the Altitude television network as an audio engineer. "We're just teaching them to be men," he adds, "and telling them when they're bullshitting."
Lewis and Butler expect to find most of their clients on the streets of northeast Park Hill. But GRID also holds monthly meetings of what it's dubbed the Intervention Support Team, a collection of representatives from various government and community agencies that interact with gang-involved youth. If a certain youth (boys and girls ages 14 to 24) meets GRID's criteria — if he has weapons charges, for example, or if she's just getting out of prison — an outreach worker will be assigned to work alongside that youth's official case manager. Callanan estimates that GRID's six outreach workers have a total of 35 cases right now, but he hopes that number will grow to 100 by the end of the year.
Jessica Cassarino also attends the Intervention Support Team, or IST, meetings. As GRID's opportunities provision coordinator, her job is to help 16- to 24-year-olds who are affiliated with a gang, or are at high risk to join one, find jobs or enroll in school. She gets many of her referrals from the probation officers and outreach workers affiliated with GRID. Cassarino started in June 2010, and says that about 90 percent of the youth she's worked with have rap sheets. Some have committed armed robbery or aggravated assault, and a few were involved in the Holly Square arson. Working with the IST ensures that their cases don't fall through the cracks. "Because they're taking notes [at the meetings] and it's a formal setting, we're able to hold each other accountable," she says.
The Mental Health Center of Denver is also part of GRID's intervention strategy. MHCD has developed a trauma treatment program called Project RISE for youth ages eleven to seventeen who have witnessed violence. It's a group that meets for sixteen sessions and teaches kids how to handle stress. "A lot of the symptoms of traumatic stress make them even more at risk for joining gangs," explains Lynn Garst, MHCD's associate director.
GRID doesn't pay for Project RISE; instead, it's funded through a two-year $760,000 federal grant that ends this September. Nearly all of the 180 kids who've gone through the program thus far come from violent neighborhoods. Many have family members who are gang members, and some are toying with joining themselves. Project manager Beth Tamborski describes the youth as "emotionally volatile." If someone looks at them crooked, they're likely to blow up and shout, "Quit staring at me!"
Garst is also part of the GRID Intervention Support Team. Outreach workers and G.R.E.A.T. coordinators refer kids to Project RISE, and on the flip side, Garst refers Project RISE kids to Cassarino and GRASP, which offers groups for gang youth.
