The power of the people sustains a city in crisis

0 Comments | Insight on the News, April 28, 1997 | by Susan Crabtree

With many government-assistance programs overloaded, private organizations and concerned citizens are stepping in to relieve inner-city social ills. In the nation's capital, their work produces tangible results daily.

Eric Johnson's voice trembles with pride when he speaks about his success brokering a gang cease-fire in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Washington. It has lasted three months -- and is holding.

"I can tell you confidently that since Jan. 31 there has been less crime in Benning Terrace than in the past four years," he says. Johnson is one of four members of the Alliance of Concerned Men who each have served prison sentences and returned to the gang-infested Benning Terrace neighborhood of Southeast Washington to confront and resist violence -- the same barbarity that contributed to the murder -- execution style -- of a 12-year-old boy in late January.

Each day, after his shift at a government printing of office, Johnson meets with other members of the alliance and 15 to 20 young men of the Simple City Crew street gang. They defuse tensions and have been helping train and motivate teenagers and young adults to remove graffiti from buildings and to plant grass and seedlings in vacant lots. "Their hands that just three months ago clutched knives and guns now hold paintbrushes, brooms and shovels," boasts Johnson.

The members of the alliance have put their street smarts to work where other intervention efforts have failed. "They have negotiated a peace without a budget, without even an of office." says Robert L. Woodson, executive director of the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, which is soliciting funds to help in an effort called Hands Across D.C. "They have done what millions of dollars and police have not done. This is a microcosm of what they could do throughout the nation."

Private organizations and citizens have emerged in the atmosphere of public despair to fight the malignancies of crime, vice and poverty in the inner city. Johnson has targeted his efforts to stop the bloodletting, yet believes the overarching solution is more fundamental. "The only thing that's even going to nick the surface is to help these kids get some jobs and to find a way to keep them in school," he says.

Government-assistance programs designed in the 1930s as a stopgap for the poor are ineffective, says conservative Walter Williams, an economist at George Mason University in Virginia and a syndicated columnist. "They haven't delivered what they promised," he says. Williams believes government solutions often fail because many lack face-to-face interaction with the people they propose to assist. With welfare, he says, "you tell people here is $400 and come back next month and you get another $400. And if you mess up you might get $500 if you have a child. None of us would treat someone we love this way. These kids need private involvement; they need people who are going to stay with them, raise hell, cajole and encourage and get involved in their lives."

The National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship, or NFTE, is one organization that not only is making high-school graduates more marketable to business, but teaching them the essentials of self-employment. Just one block from the White House, on the third floor of a downtown building, Patrice Tsague is persuading eight district high-school graduates to read the Wall Street Journal. "Your mind is like a muscle, and when you don't exercise it, what happens?" he asks. A young man responds: "You lose your imagination and you're not sharp."

"That's right," Tsague says, underscoring his response with an encouraging grin. "You've got to move beyond what ordinary people do; you've got to read every day."

As a teacher, Tsague is a driving force behind NFTE, a privately funded organization that provides inner-city youth with the tools to enter and compete in the business world. It was founded in 1987 and serves 14 cities across the country. Through a two-year, $1 million grant from the David H. Koch Charitable Foundation, NFTE established a district division in 1994 and since has trained 1,000 district youths in school programs they operate in partnership with D.C. public schools. The organization offers an 80-hour core "mini-MBA program" that teaches students basic business skills including market research and cost-benefit analysis, investing, effective selling techniques and business law -- concepts missing in most secondary educational programs. In addition, the district branch of NFTE has started a graduate program and the first youth BizCenter to provide one-on-one consulting about business development. "We are not a charity; we think of NFTE as an investment that will have a return," says an enthusiastic Julie Silard, director of the district division of NFTE.

Sixteen-year-old Regina Jackson took a mini-MBA course at Hine Junior High School three years ago. During that semester, Jackson started her own jewelry-making business that has won national entrepreneurship awards. Silard says NFTE simply gave Jackson the training to channel her entrepreneurial drive. As a young child, Jackson often would buy balloons, fill them with water and sell them to other neighborhood children during the sweltering Washington summers. "We would make money to buy things at the ice-cream truck," she remembers. "We didn't want to depend on our grandmother, since we knew the family was having hard times."