Building to House Many Youth Services

The Valley Youth Initiative, a five-year, $9-million job training program for youths, will soon be based in the same building as an informal juvenile court and an existing gang intervention program, officials said Wednesday.

Los Angeles City Councilman Alex Padilla introduced a motion Wednesday seeking final approval of the leases to house the three agencies in the same building. He said services for young people were especially needed after a monthlong spate of gang-related shootings that left four young men dead in the northeast Valley.

“If we don’t work together, we run the risk of seeing the [higher] levels of violence we saw in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s,” Padilla said.

In the fall, the federally funded youth initiative will begin making job training referrals in a city-owned building on Glenoaks Boulevard. The initiative, which will be administered by the city’s Housing Authority, is composed of a coalition including the UCLA Community-based Learning Program, the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles Youth Employment, and the Los Angeles Unified School District.

The building will house a Los Angeles County Informal Juvenile Traffic Court, which will handle infractions committed by first-time offenders--misdemeanors such as graffiti vandalism, curfew violations, truancy, traffic violations, and minor drug violations. The Los Angeles Police Department’s “Balancing the Odds” anti-gang program is already housed at the building.

John Barron, a community outreach counselor with the Phoenix Academy of Los Angeles, a drug rehabilitation center for juveniles in Lake View Terrace, said he welcomed the new services.

“It will give [youths] an opportunity before they end up in the juvenile system,” Barron said.

Padilla had begun seeking funding for the youth initiative last fall, after a City Council panel rejected a request to include Pacoima in an application for a $12-million federal job training grant for young people, limiting it to Watts and East Los Angeles. Padilla said Wednesday that he hopes the program will become a model for using prevention measures to reduce crime. “We will be setting the foundation for the success of that approach,” he said.