Youths bring message of empowerment to City Council

Yawu Miller

More than 100 youth attended the first hearing convened by the City Council’s Committee on Youth and Violence last week and their message was encapsulated in the flyers the mostly teenage audience members displayed that read “More programs — less lock-up.”

The hearing, convened by Councilor Felix Arroyo, was aimed at garnering input from the teens on how to combat the rising tide of violence among youths.

The teens made their opinions known.

“Youth want to be a part of the decision-making,” said Dorchester resident Donsha Cureton. “They want to be looked at as important factors in their community, but they feel no one is listening to them.”

Councilors Charles Yancey, Michael Ross, Chuck Turner, Michael Flaherty and Felix Arroyo listened on as Cureton and other teens gave testimony and articulated what they said are the unmet needs of Boston teenagers.

Arguing that law-abiding teens are losing out while policy makers focus their resources on the minority of teens who are criminally involved, dozens of teen speakers called on the council to advocate for more funding for teen programming, more youth jobs and better relations with police.

“Two years ago, the state cut hundreds of youth jobs from the budget,” noted Jessica Rojas. “Now that the state is getting more money, it’s time to put more money back into the budget.”

While Mayor Thomas Menino has allocated city funds for summer jobs and has leaned heavily on the local business community to do the same, the demand for summer jobs remains high. The Menino administration has also been supportive of efforts to build teen centers, most recently helping to broker a deal for a center in the Dudley Street area with the Salvation Army and the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative.

But for many teens, there are too few safe spaces to spend time after school and during summers.

“There are close to 45,000 teenagers in Boston — a figure that will continue to grow over the next decade — and only 20 percent of their time is spent in school,” Cureton testified, reading from a written statement. “What do we do with the other 80 percent of our time? Local and national research reveals that, in a world where many families have parents who are working, significant numbers of teens spend their out-of-school time in largely unsupervised and unstructured ways.”

Members of the United Youth and Youth Workers of Boston, a consortium of organizations working with teenagers, polled teenagers and found they want both structured programs for after school — art, music, dance activities — as well as unstructured safe spaces for after-school hours.

The teens delivered to the mayor’s office a detailed list of policy recommendations. City Councilor Chuck Turner, when questioned about his commitment to working for the teens’ goals, urged those at the hearing to remain involved.

“There’s no way you can know whether I’m committed or any of us are committed until you see what we do,” he said. “What you need to do is stay on us. When the vote goes down on the budget, if the money is not in there, look at who voted for the budget.”