Asian/Pacific Islander Youth Violence Prevention Center: Community Mobilization Efforts to Reduce and Prevent Youth Violence

Background 

In many ways the city of Oakland is similar to most large cities across the U.S. The 2000 U.S. Census7 shows that Oakland has a total population of nearly 400,000 residents; African Americans are the largest racial group (37%), followed by Whites (26%) and Hispanics (22%; Table 1). Collectively, AAPIs constitute approximately 16% of the city’s residents. These ethnic proportions are generally representative of Oakland’s youth population. However, in the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) in 2000, only about 6% of all students were white.

Table 1. Population, by race/ethnicity, Oakland, 2000a7

		Population	Percent of total population	Percent of Asian and Pacific Islander population
	Total	399,484	100.0
	African American	146,510	36.7
	Caucasian	101,996	25.5
	Hispanic	87,467	21.9
	Asian	65,267	16.3
	Other	5199	1.3
	Native American	4658	1.2
	Pacific Islander	2886	0.7
	Total Asian and Pacific Islander:	69,152	17.3	100.0
	Asian (including Hispanic):	66,400	16.6	96.0
	Asian Indian	2321	0.6	3.4
	Cambodian	3237	0.8	4.7
	Chinese	34,242	8.6	49.5
	Filipino	8191	2.1	11.8
	Japanese	3162	0.8	4.6
	Korean	2131	0.5	3.1
	Laotian	3206	0.8	4.6
	Vietnamese	9658	2.4	14.0
	Pacific Islander (including Hispanic):	3218	0.8	4.7
	Polynesian	2194	0.5	3.2
	Native Hawaiian	547	0.1	0.8
	Samoan	514	0.1	0.7
	Tongan	1129	0.3	1.6

a Major racial categories do not include Hispanics, except the Hispanic category. The detailed ethnic groups do include Hispanics. Throughout the table, multiracial people may be included in more than one category for both major racial categories and Asian and Pacific Islander groups; therefore, the detail may not add up to the total numbers.

AAPI youth growing up in Oakland face many challenges, including language barriers and higher poverty levels than the average Oakland resident.20 The top five languages spoken by the district’s 2348 English Learner students in the 2003–04 school year were Spanish (59.5%), Cantonese (14.7%), Khmer/Cambodian (7.1%), Vietnamese (5.5%), and Mien (a tribe from Laos, 4.25%).21 Many AAPI parents, first-generation immigrants or refugees unfamiliar with navigating western social systems, often rely on their children to act as translators or mediators. AAPI youth from some ethnic groups in Oakland have disproportionately high contact with the juvenile justice system. In Alameda County, where Oakland is located, Southeast Asian and Pacific Islander youth have among the highest arrest rates of all racial/ethnic groups when AAPI juvenile arrest rates are disaggregated by ethnicity.20, 22

This trend poses a disturbing backdrop to other problems. In 2002, the OUSD declared bankruptcy and turned over all control to a state-appointed superintendent. Researchers outside of the local area took note. A study released in 2005 by Harvard University’s Civil Rights Project and the Urban Institute’s Education Policy Center in Washington, DC found Oakland’s high school drop-out rate to be 52%.23 In light of these youthful and familial challenges, the National Council on Crime and Delinquency (NCCD) and the API Center mobilized with AAPI communities in Oakland to understand and address these concerns better, in hopes of reducing and preventing youth violence and its attendant risk factors.

Data-Driven Activities 

The engagement strategies used to mobilize the AAPI community in Oakland were initially research-driven. The process was initiated in 2000 when NCCD staff met with the executive directors of three community-based organizations (CBOs)—Asian Community Mental Health Services, Asian Health Services, and East Bay Asian Youth Center—to discuss a potential mobilization process and ask for support in a youth violence prevention community mobilization effort. Each of these organizations had existed for at least 20 years and held contracts with the city and county to provide health and social services to various AAPI ethnic groups. They acknowledged the importance and the need to bring the AAPI community together to reduce and prevent youth violence. API Center staff also acquired the support of the Asian Advisory Committee on Crime, sponsored by the Oakland Police Department.

In 2001, NCCD held a community leaders orientation with approximately 50 people representing CBOs, the school district, and law enforcement agencies, plus concerned unaffiliated individuals. NCCD staff presented data that had been collected and analyzed by API Center staff, primarily by disaggregating juvenile arrest records in the “Other Asian” category into specific AAPI ethnic groups.21 These data showed an increasing trend in the number of incarcerated AAPI youth, particularly Southeast Asian youth. NCCD asked the participants about their reactions to the data and their interest in initiating a data-driven, research-based community mobilization effort to prevent AAPI youth violence. The attendees raised several issues and concerns.

First, they acknowledged the prevalence and urgency of addressing AAPI youth violence in Oakland and were especially impressed by the disaggregated data, which did not place all AAPI youth into one homogenous category. Second, attendees were excited about the opportunity to network and learn more about each other’s work and respective organizations. However, some participants were concerned about how the process would authentically include the participation of particular ethnic groups, such as various Pacific Islanders. Attendees also underscored the importance of relating this effort to a primary concern of increasing funding to support AAPI youth programs.

After two more meetings, participants committed to the community mobilization effort. Some expressed skepticism about the feasibility of this effort, as a result of their prior experiences with unsuccessful collaborations and the perpetual marginalization of AAPI needs and issues in Oakland. Other participants wanted more information about the API Center’s agenda and what resources it could contribute. There was clear consensus, however, on the need for the pooling of resources, data collection on disaggregated AAPI youth, and the belief that research findings would speak to policy and decision making more effectively than anecdotal stories. One participant shared that not only is she usually the only representative of an AAPI organization at other policy meetings, but that she is frequently asked to provide statistics legitimizing the concerns of all AAPI youth, thereby perpetuating the assumption that all AAPI youth are the same.

The group began to meet monthly and prioritized the kinds of data they wanted to collect through the community mobilization process. Subcommittees were formed to guide data collection and interpretation around each of the following prioritized areas: demographics, education, juvenile justice, and behavioral health. A Youth Input Subcommittee was also created to conduct youth focus groups and solicit youths’ reactions to significant findings.

Outreach and Dissemination Activities 

A completed report, entitled “Under the Microscope: Asian and Pacific Islander Youth in Oakland, Needs, Issues, Solutions,”20 was published in 2003, two years after the first meeting. At a press conference held at a high school to publicize the report and recommendations for improving the status of AAPI youth in Oakland, local officials expressed their support for the report. Planning subcommittees then began working to implement the recommendations in the report and spread some of the report’s key findings throughout AAPI communities in Oakland.

For example, the annual Oakland Chinatown StreetFest is a weekend event with booths, cultural performances, and various informational demonstrations. Approximately 100,000 people attend each year. NCCD regularly rents booth space to disseminate information on the severity of AAPI youth violence and on prevention resources in the community. Booth staff are bilingual and trained in presenting the information. These community events have required that the API Center tailor its materials and outreach strategies to the specific cultural and linguistic backgrounds of Oakland’s AAPI audiences.

The predominant group attending StreetFest are Chinese immigrant elderly—often caretakers for their grandchildren—who are mostly monolingual and handle all their personal business in Chinatown, regardless of where they live in Alameda County. Drawing the attention of this population is a challenge, as is conveying the importance and relevance of youth violence to their lives. To address the linguistic barriers, foster interest in these issues, and engage community members who find it easier to listen to information, the API Center provides audio recordings about AAPI youth violence prevention in several Chinese dialects. Translated fact sheets and copies of articles from Chinese newspapers covering the API Center’s work are also popular among booth visitors. Effective strategies to encourage people to complete surveys include holding raffle drawings for orchid plants and giving away promotional items, such as pens or keychain flashlights.

Outcomes and Challenges 

The primary outcome for stakeholders of API Center’s community mobilization efforts in Oakland has been the production of research-based literature on specific AAPI youth groups’ social concerns, in languages accessible to diverse AAPI ethnic groups. The API Center produced and made available to CBOs an Oakland Asian Pacific Islander Youth Service Providers Resource Guide, which cross-referenced organizational information and types of services provided in AAPI languages. Another useful tool was dissemination of two-page fact sheets that summarized the findings from the Under the Microscope report, and which highlighted data on specific community groups, such as Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, Cambodian, Laotian, Filipino, and Pacific Islanders. All of these fact sheets, translated into their respective languages, have been extremely popular at community meetings and presentations.

A secondary outcome of producing disaggregated information on diverse AAPI youth violence rates has been to build community capacity. For instance, service providers and practitioners began using quantitative data to reinforce the anecdotal stories previously used to substantiate funding requests for youth programs to prevent violence and promote positive youth development in culturally and linguistically appropriate ways. The community mobilization was also an opportunity for service providers and practitioners from different fields to work together and share resources toward a common goal of preventing AAPI youth violence. In particular, the mobilization process helped to increase participants’ understanding of the connections between education, behavioral health, and youth violence.

The mobilization also gave smaller CBOs added leverage when interacting with such institutions as the school district and probation department. Subsequent advocacy activities have included meeting with local officials to share data and discuss prevention recommendations, conducting staff trainings for the OUSD and assisting them with community outreach, collaborating with the probation department and a county supervisor to develop a multilingual DVD for AAPI parents about the juvenile justice system, and participating in a countywide language access effort.

A major challenge in the Oakland AAPI community mobilization effort was identifying ways to work effectively with smaller AAPI CBOs and ethnic groups historically marginalized within the AAPI community. For instance, in Oakland, building trusting relationships with CBOs that work with Southeast Asian youth and families (e.g., Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian, Hmong, and Mien) was a difficult but essential challenge. Because policymakers generally viewed all AAPI youth as homogenous model minorities without severe violence issues, putting youth from these more marginalized AAPI ethnic groups “on the map” was a central task. In addition, outreach to these less visible AAPI groups, via translated research materials that spotlighted their overrepresentation in the juvenile justice system, helped to galvanize the broader AAPI community by recognizing its diversity.

Background 

Waipahu is located roughly 14 miles west of Honolulu and is designated a “place” in the U.S. Census.7 Now over 100 years old, Waipahu evolved from Hawaii’s plantation history into the present-day community of roughly 70,000 residents. Demographically, the diverse population of Waipahu includes Filipinos (50.3%), “Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders” (12.3%), Japanese (10.5%), and Caucasians, African Americans, and additional Asian groups (e.g., Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese).7

Like many communities across the United States, Waipahu is divided into different neighborhoods geographically close to one another but with stark socioeconomic differences. Prevention efforts and enforcement agencies in Waipahu have generally focused on working with two low-income public housing neighborhoods crowded into less than one square mile: the “Pupu” Streets and Aniani Place. The five Pupu Streets have 80 buildings with 756 apartment units. Located just across Waipahu’s main highway, Aniani Place is a large cul-de-sac of 28 buildings with 247 apartment units; residents often say ominously that there is “one way in, one way out.” These two communities are also highly transient, with an occupancy rate of approximately 50%.24

A substantial portion of the residents are Samoan or Native Hawaiian. Recently, Waipahu has seen a major influx of migrants from the Marshall Islands and Chuuk, in search of improved health care (a residual effect of America’s nuclear weapons testing in Micronesia following World War II).25, 26 Other low-income public housing neighborhoods in Waipahu have similar ethnic demographics, although they tend not to draw the same levels of police enforcement and prevention efforts. Additional neighborhoods in Waipahu consist predominantly of large Filipino and other Asian families, living in working- and middle-class homes.

Waipahu’s intermediate school is the largest in Hawaii and its high school has the second largest student body in the state. The diversity of the student body is shown in Table 2.

Table 2. Waipahu Intermediate and Waipahu High School student body, by ethnicity, school year 2003–200427, 28

		Waipahu Intermediate	Waipahu High
	Total student body population	1378	2338
	Filipino	57.8%	59.5%
	Samoan	12.8%	10.9%
	Hawaiian/part-Hawaiian	10.5%	10.2%
	Other	8.4%	9.2%
	Japanese	3.8%	3.4%
	White	2.3%	2.1%
	Latino	1.5%	1.1%
	Black/African American	1.2%	1.5%
	Portuguese	0.7%	0.9%
	Chinese	0.5%	0.6%
	Indo-Chinese	0.3%	0.2%
	Korean	0.2%	0.3%
	Native American	0.1%	0.0%

Waipahu’s three core values are (1) respect of its heritage and culture; (2) caring for its families; and (3) appreciation for its physical environment.24 These served as the foundation for the mobilization process.

Data-Driven Activities 

In early 2003, the API Center began working with the Waipahu Community Association (which oversees most prevention activities in Waipahu), community leaders who represented various youth-oriented CBOs in Waipahu, government representatives, and the Waipahu High School principal to discuss the possibility of facilitating a youth violence prevention mobilization process. As in Oakland, this effort centered on improving understanding of the community’s youth violence issues and adopting a plan to improve prevention of youth violence and its attendant risk factors. The Waipahu Community Association had been awarded a three-year State Incentive Grant for a youth substance use prevention program based on the Communities that Care29 planning process. Community stakeholders participating in mobilization efforts to prevent youth violence decided that this process could inform the Communities that Care process, scheduled to begin in Fall 2003.

Also similar to Oakland, the Waipahu mobilization effort formally began with a large meeting, catered by Waipahu High School’s culinary program, at which API Center staff and trainers from NCCD (API Center, Oakland site) introduced themselves, described various mobilization processes, and answered questions. Attendees acknowledged the seriousness of youth violence and substance use in their community. They agreed that a research-based mobilization effort was needed to recognize which youth (e.g., by gender, age, ethnicity) in Waipahu were overrepresented in the juvenile justice system, relative to their overall community population.

Three community workgroups were formed, and decided to author a comprehensive report on the seriousness of youth violence in their community: (1) Data Collection; (2) Youth Outreach; and (3) Resource Assessment. The Data Collection Workgroup teamed with an API Center professor and a research associate from the University of Hawaii Department of Urban and Regional Planning. In this collaborative effort, API Center personnel presented juvenile arrest data from 2001. Workgroup members asked API Center staff to map out areas within Waipahu where juvenile arrest rates were unusually high. These maps gave community members an idea of where youth from different ethnic, gender, and age groups were being arrested and the offenses with which they were charged. Workgroup members, in turn, provided API Center staff with additional data requests that helped to determine where prevention efforts should be directed.

The Data Collection Workgroup felt that some statistics were especially important. Repeat offenders accounted for 59.7% of all arrests made of Waipahu juveniles; 68.5% of all repeat offenders were 15 years old or younger and 67.4% were girls. Of offenses against persons, (e.g., robbery, assault), 43.4% were attributed to Samoan youth, even though they are only 11% of Waipahu’s juvenile population. Workgroup members were also surprised that very few youth from different Micronesian backgrounds were arrested. The Workgroup also learned that youth residing in the Pupu and Aniani Place neighborhoods were not overrepresented in juvenile arrests, thereby countering the commonly held belief that youth from these low-income communities were the highest risk and most delinquent in Waipahu.24

Outreach and Dissemination Activities 

Community workgroups also felt that youthful perspectives on community violence were important, and that adults alone should not determine youth violence prevention needs. Therefore, the Youth Outreach Workgroup created two subcommittees, one for intermediate school and the other for high school youth. Both subcommittees held focus groups. The intermediate school focus group consisted of nine youth representing a spectrum of risk levels; some were in student government and others were in a substance use intervention program. The high school focus group consisted of 10 adolescents, all involved in an after-school program for high-risk teens. Both genders and a mix of ethnicities were represented in each focus group. API Center staff participated in the focus groups, assisting with facilitation and transcription.

Both focus groups noted the severity of substance use and how it contributes to property crime, a lack of adequate youth activities, family breakdown, and the preponderance of gang influence in their communities. A number of high school participants who lived in the Pupu community expressed their discomfort with the location of a transition home for ex-convicts in their community, asking why their community was chosen as the location. These youth felt that having the home in their community perpetuated violence and substance use problems, because the recovery of ex-convicts was impeded by their exposure to elevated levels of neighborhood violence and substance use in the Pupu Streets.

Youth Outreach Workgroup members analyzed the focus group transcripts and wrote up their analysis. The information gathered from the intermediate and high school students helped to humanize and augment the quantitative arrest data analyzed by the Data Collection Group. It also helped to further illustrate the need for enhanced violence and substance use prevention services in the community. For example, the youths’ perspectives on gangs helped illuminate the influence of gang violence in the community reflected in the juvenile arrest data.

Outcomes and Challenges 

The Waipahu community mobilization process had two distinct outcomes, the first of which was the production of a data-driven and community-written report, The Waipahu Community Response Plan to Youth Violence and Delinquency.24 In the report, the Resource Assessment Workgroup outlined its recommendations, which were based on findings from the Data Collection and Youth Outreach Workgroups.

The community expressed serious concern about the high number of young repeat offenders, and surprise that many were girls. The role of gangs and illicit drugs in youth violence in their community was another concern. The Resource Assessment Workgroup suggested the community bring in programs for students in intermediate school, to address gang violence and substance use. Other recommendations included reconnecting families (because extended family bonds are a core aspect of Polynesian and Asian cultures) and working with community leaders to address the transition home in the Pupu community.

In terms of ethnicity, the community emphasized a need for violence prevention programs for Samoan adolescents, because of their overrepresentation in arrests for offenses against persons. Concerns for Micronesian youth also surfaced. The community was surprised that these youth were not overrepresented in juvenile arrests, because they were known to be encountering serious concerns, such as dealing with physical and mental health ailments and feeling heavily alienated in school. Based on these anecdotal observations, workgroup members suggested increased violence prevention services for Micronesian youth, to prevent escalated rates of violence and substance use in the future. These findings also helped to pave the way for the Communities That Care29 initiative that followed in late 2003. Unfortunately, the greatest challenge and ongoing concern for Waipahu community workgroups was enlisting participation in the mobilization process from Micronesian youth and community leaders.