Early results from San Diego youth collaborative shows big results

Safe Neighborhoods | Youth Development

San Diego Organizing Project (SDOP), August 1, 2009

For the past two years, PICO affiliate San Diego Organizing Project (SDOP) has led a vision and effort to make San Diego the most youth-friendly city in the United States. SDOP's hard work has resulted in some extraordinary wins thus far.

Last summer, San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders and SDOP kicked off a jointly led task force consisting of city and county-wide agencies, service providers, and schools.  The Task Force's focus is to create new education, enrichment, and juvenile justice diversion opportunities for youth within the existing support system and identify ways to strengthen and grow that system year by year.

First-year progress of the Task Force's work have resulted in the San Diego Unified School District's highest-ever attendance rates, a drop in the number of dropouts district-wide, revamped school district polices regarding truancy and attendance, and a district-wide focus on targeted student interventions.

SDOP also worked with the school district to encourage it to apply for Federal Stimulus money from the federal Workforce Investment Act for summer jobs for youth. The school district consequently became the largest provider of summer jobs for young people in San Diego, and received a multi-million dollar grant from the federal Government. New collaborations between the San Diego Unified School District, the San Diego Police Department, San Diego County Probation Department, and other city and county government agencies and departments has led to at least three new federal grants for public safety related activities to be opened to community partnership involvement.  This will make these programs more accessible and effective in reaching our goal of a safer community, and providing hope and new opportunity for youth.

Before SDOP's issue work toward making San Diego a youth friendly city, the San Diego Police Department had some of the lowest "juvenile diversion rates" of any major American city.  This meant young people in most cases were processed through the juvenile justice system rather than receiving intervention assistance. Since the start of 2009, all this has changed. Thanks to a series of local and federated actions, in the last six months, diversion referral rates by the San Diego Police Department for Southeastern San Diego and City Heights (the two neighborhoods with the highest juvenile crime) have shot up by 497% and 2010% respectively when compared with the same period in 2008.

For more information about SDOP's youth work, visit www.sdop.net