Gang Busters
Hawaii’s gang problem is in crisis mode, and Sid and Judie Rosen of Adult Friends for Youth are dedicated to helping teens get their lives together
By Alice Keesing
E-mail this story | Print this page | Archive | RSS |
Del.icio.us
The Rosen family (from left) Lisa and Corey Rosenlee,
Judie, Sid, David and Marcella Rosen
to the Ewa Beach turf.
“The police were there, they had helicopters, the whole nine yards, it looked like South Central L.A., and there was literally a stand-off between the kids from Kalihi and the police,” Rosen says.
AFY went in and asked if they could talk to the kids. They hadn’t worked with any of them before, but the agency had enough cred with the group for the kids to listen.
“We had two vans, we picked the kids up and got them out of there, and that was the end of the confrontation,” Rosen says.
U.S. Attorney Ed Kubo credits AFY with its role in quelling that situation and for its work with high-risk youth.
“(AFY) has been very instrumental in reducing the temptation for kids to become involved in gangs and it has also been very helpful to the (Department of Education) and the schools in assisting or preventing gang and youth violence,” Kubo says.
Aside from the hot spots around Kalihi and Ewa Beach, Rosen believes that Waipahu is “the real tinder box.”
“We’re working with eight groups alone at Waipahu,” he says.
“One of the groups that we’re also seeing more and more getting into acting out, into aggressive behaviors, are the Micronesians; they’re kind of like the new population on the block,” Rosen says. “A lot of it is the housing projects, the poverty. Essentially the gangs are a low-income minority problem. People who want to be very politically correct say gangs affect everybody. But the fact of the matter is it’s the kids who can’t find their way out of poverty.”
Help for these kids has always been in scarce supply, Rosen says.
“The mentality is that once kids reach a certain point, once they’ve crossed over to that gang life, that they’re lost, that there’s no way back for them,” Rosen says. “So money will go into law enforcement, you see all the time talk about building more prisons, bolstering the police, instead of money going into rehabilitation.”
Fighting for funding has been a constant for AFY.
“The population we work with is demonized and they’re a hard sell,” Rosen says.
Still, AFY is a non-profit success story just in the fact that it’s still around in the scramble for money. And that has been thanks in large part to Judie Rosen. Way back at the beginning, the former elementary school teacher agreed to raise money for her husband’s fledgling agency.
“It was just for one year,” she says with a knowing look. Two decades later, the tenacious lady is still doing it and the AFY fundraiser has become something of a landmark.
The first year, they raised $37,500. By last year, that had grown to $370,000. The dinner, which is coming up on Nov. 24, includes one of Hawaii’s largest silent auctions with about 1,000 items ranging from Lasik surgery to private jet rides to a kids’mini Mercedes. It takes a year and 250 volunteers to pull it all together. But glamour and glitz aside, the highlight of the evening is always the testimony of AFY’s clients, Judie Rosen says.
“It’s just overwhelming,” she says.
Christopher Maru will be there this year to talk about how Adult Friends for Youth turned his life around. Maru met AFY’s senior master practitioner Deborah Spencer when he was 12.
“I wasn’t really into gangs, but I was getting into drugs and alcohol,” he says.
Once or twice a week, Spencer would arrive at his housing project and pick up the kids and take them out. They’d go to the beach, eat hot dogs at Costco, play football.
“I’d never experienced some of these things,” Maru says. “Like going out and stuff. It always just used to be hanging out with all the guys in the housing and getting up to no good.”
Seven years later, Maru just earned his high school diploma - the first in his family - thanks to AFY’s C-Base program. He’s working as a pasta cook at California Pizza Kitchen and looking forward to going to college and learning carpentry.
“They really helped me out with my life,” he says. “If it wasn’t for them I could be in jail right now, that’s the way my life was heading.”
Adult Friends for Youth 20th Annual Celebration of Youth dinner and auction will be held Nov. 24 at the Sheraton Waikiki. Tickets range from $1,500 to $3,500 for a table. Call Judie Rosen at 395-6008 or Jocelyn Valdez at 833-8775.
Page 2 of 2 pages for this story < 1 2
E-mail this story | Print this page | Comments (0) | Archive | RSS
Most Recent Comment(s):
