Coalition of ministers seeking 1,000 anti-crime volunteers

Yawu Miller

A coalition of activist ministers is urging community residents to step forward in an effort to reach out to the city’s most troubled teens.

Ten Point Coalition’s announcement of its ambitious plans to recruit 1,000 volunteers made the front page of the Boston Globe recently, which hailed the initiative as “the largest undertaken since the youth crime wave of the early 1990s.”

Coalition Executive Director Christopher Sumner said the main idea is to mobilize the congregations of area churches to enlist as volunteer outreach workers to children in areas plagued by violence.

The model, used widely by the Nation of Islam and other church groups, calls for volunteers to walk in groups in high crime areas and meet with teens on the streets. In this form of outreach, volunteers typically try to encourage youth to avail themselves of a range of services designed to steer them away from crime.

“What we’re trying to do is engage with youth who are straddling the line,” Sumner said.

Coalition members plan to connect the volunteers to different agencies including the Boston Police Department, the Department of Youth Services and the Probation Department to train them in outreach. The volunteers would then perform the outreach under the supervision of the churches or community organizations they belong to.

The Ten Point Coalition’s initiative represents the latest attempt by anti-crime activists to marshal resources against the growing gun violence in the city. While community activists expressed cautious optimism for the plan, some questioned whether the Ten Point Coalition’s modus operandi of working as intermediaries between police and churches will work in the current crime wave.

Horace Small, executive director of the Union of Minority Neighborhoods, said efforts initiated by individual organizations like Ten Point will not be effective if they are not part of a wider strategy.

“Where’s the city’s master plan for dealing with crime,” he said. “We haven’t seen that. There are all kinds of stakeholders in this. It would make sense to bring together all the stakeholders to develop a comprehensive plan so that anybody can play a part. A whole bunch of black preachers walking the streets of Grove Hall does not solve the problem.”

So far, the largest gatherings around anti-crime strategies in the community have been those convened by black elected officials in January and this month at the Roxbury YMCA. Those meetings have brought together teens, youth workers, police officers, anti-crime activists and other community residents for brainstorming sessions that the officials have culled into eight proposed policy initiatives.

The black elected officials’ efforts appear unconnected with Mayor Thomas Menino’s crime fighting initiatives, the latest of which is his controversial call to outfit dangerous criminals on parole with ankle bracelets equipped with global positioning satellites.

The Ten Point Coalition’s call for outreach volunteers has been better received in the community than the mayor’s electronic bracelet idea. But the fact that other religious groups and community organizations are already using that method makes the coalition’s call suspect in the eyes of some activists.

“Everybody’s been holding their own meetings,” said Marlena Rose, who coordinates the Roxbury Environmental Education Program and meets with a group called United Youth and Youth Workers. “People are coming up with many of the same answers, but everyone wants to have their own separate solution.”

Sumner described the Ten Point effort as a collaborative one, stressing that churches in the city would be the engine of the Ten Point Coalition’s program.

“There’s a huge volunteer pool in the churches,” he said. “We want to get them recommitted. We’re trying to use the Ten Point’s history and name to galvanize people.”

Whether or not the Ten Point Coalition can successfully mobilize that pool remains to be seen. The organization has a staff of nine and a budget the Rev. Jeffrey Brown said is between $500,000 and $700,000 a year.

But an article in last week’s Boston Globe, which laid bare a long-simmering fissure between Ten Point Coalition members and their former colleague, Eugene Rivers, painted a picture of ministers in the coalition battling over funds and credit for crime-fighting initiatives.

The Rev. Bruce Wall is among those who pulled out of the coalition early on. Others in local black churches appear to keep the coalition at arm’s length.

“We’ve been doing walks with faith-based organizations for months,” said one church activist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “People don’t trust the Ten Point Coalition. Basically, what’s happened in the past is that they claim credit for the work of other groups. Then they get funds, even when they don’t have the capacity to do the work.”

But Sumner said the Ten Point Coalition, which has a staff of nine, has not received any additional funding for its current outreach effort.

“We can argue, struggle and debate about how we need more money,” he said. “But the money ain’t coming tomorrow.”