GRYD FOUNDATION

To combat the problem and effects of community violence, The GRYD Foundation focuses primarily on addressing the lack of community safe spaces and promoting employment, income earning and development opportunities for youth. Our core objectives center on reducing gang-related violence and strengthening individuals, families, and communities.

To help achieve these objectives, the GRYD Foundation role is to provide the following scope of services:

Objective 1. Reduce Gang-Related Violence
The GRYD Foundation boosts peacekeeping efforts by placing 85-90 seasonal gang intervention workers at public parks/recreation centers in GRYD zones during extended hours for the Summer Night Lights and Fall Friday Nights programs. These seasonal workers bolster the Mayor’s Office’s year-round gang intervention workers; this collaborative team is essential for creating a safe environment at the parks. Summer Night Lights serves 32 locations Wednesdays through Saturdays from June to August; Fall Friday Nights serves 8 targeted locations (due to recent spikes in violence) over eight Fridays from September to November.

Objective 2. Strengthen Individuals, Families, and Communities
The GRYD Foundation assists the City to provide community engagement activities during the Summer Night Lights (32 locations) and Fall Friday Nights (8 locations) programs, such as free recreation, arts, health & wellness, sports & fitness, meals, and linkages to City services. The GRYD program model includes the City hiring over 300 youth from the surrounding program sites each summer, providing marginalized youth with summer jobs and training. These GRYD workers are called Youth Squad. The GRYD Foundation provides year-round youth development programming (Youth Squad 360) for 50-80 of the Youth Squad summer hires. Youth Squad 360 focuses on education/careers, mentoring, work readiness, housing, transportation, and wellness. Current Summer Night Lights Youth Squad and Youth Squad alumni gain access to year-round Youth Squad 360 case management services to help them process emotions and address trauma, begin to adopt healthy coping mechanisms and new patterns of thinking, and grow in setting, pursuing and achieving academic, career and wellness goals.

1. Extended & Expanded Programming / Community Intervention and Law Enforcement Engagement. In the evenings during the summer, SNL provides free youth and adult-centered athletic, recreational, educational and artistic activities for individuals residing in 32 Los Angeles communities that are characterized high levels of gang violence relative to the average for Los Angeles, high percentages of families living below the poverty line and high concentrations of youth vulnerable to gang influence.

Each Summer Night Lights site offers a minimum of two youth and adult sports leagues from among basketball, soccer, softball and volleyball. We contract several Zumba, dance and yoga instructors to provide fitness classes. We offer skills based sports clinics and additional sports and fitness activities. Our city-wide Summer Night Lights skate competition serves to break down barriers and build relationships across neighborhood lines.

Intervention Workers and Los Angeles Police Officers engage in proactive peace-making activities, including referring youth to the program and engaging gang involved or ex-gang involved youth and adults in positive activities. LAPD Officers and intervention workers engage with community members by reading books with youth and parents, polishing little girls' nails, playing board games, and even breaking a sweat on the basketball court.

The success of the summer programming and the increasing need for positive activities for youth and families year round prompted the offering of workshops and resource connections on Fridays from late September through mid November (Fall Friday Nights — also known as FFN.)

2. Resource and Service Linkages. SNL / FFN collaborates with local agencies to provide participants with increased access to services and educational information, as well as programming and resources that will have lasting effects throughout the year -- these include domestic violence service providers, health related educational information and screenings, such as HIV/STD testing, optometry screenings, physical fitness clinics, blood pressure testing, and identification of employment and educational resources for Youth Squad members beyond the summer.

3. Youth Squad 360: The summer program hires close to 350 young people ages 17-24 from the community who are vulnerable to gang influence and/or gang-violence. These youth are eligible to receive a needs assessment, individualized service strategy and case management as part of the Youth Squad 360 component. Service options include skills based workshops; vocational, career and college readiness training; connections to mental health services; assistance accessing benefits; and mentoring. Youth Squad 360 facilitates access to services that address participants' overall well being, which can include better access to healthy food and eating habits, access to physical activity, and access to stable housing.

The GRYD Foundation works closely with the Office of Gang Reduction & Youth Development (GRYD) and we have adopted a team approach for the planning, implementation and supervision of program sites. The program team consists of experienced program managers, coordinators and Youth Squad 360 program director and case manager (behavior intervention background and state certified substance abuse counselor.) Additional GRYD staff oversee sites and seasonal staff during program implementation. Each SNL site will be staffed by seasonal staff that are part of the site coordination team --- 64 site coordinators (2 per site), 10 Youth Squad and 1 Lead Youth Squad per site, plus Community Intervention Workers, and recreation and parks staff. GRYD staff also oversee sites and seasonal staff during implementation of FFN. All FFN sites will be staffed by 1 Program Coordinator, and 1 Youth Coordinator, plus Community Intervention Workers, and recreation and parks staff.

Our programming model provides a platform for inter-agency collaboration and vast community engagement, bringing together a diverse range of partners to effectively leverage resources for community members. Partner collaboration consists of workshop or activity facilitation, provision of resources, and participation in resource fairs and mentoring networking events in order to connect community members with local resources and services that are available year-round.

Finally, the continued partnership between The GRYD Foundation, the Mayor's GRYD Office, and the Los Angeles Police department creates a space where community members feel comfortable enough to volunteer and participate in SNL and FFN programming. As a result of their contributions and ideas programming at each location is tailored for a specific site ensuring that the program remains effective and relevant to specific community needs. Local law enforcement agencies also provide volunteers to assist with site activities. The interaction between community members in a gang-influenced neighborhood and police officers in a jovial setting serves to build trust and improve community relations with the Los Angeles Police Department. The consistent investment on behalf of both community and police volunteers represents an effort to ensure the long-term sustainability of the programming.

The scale and impact of this work is substantial. The GRYD Foundation serves an estimated 500,000 unduplicated individuals per year. An external research and evaluation team led by Dr. Denise Herz, at California State University, Los Angeles, analyzes GRYD programming data for the City including Summer Night Lights and Fall Friday Nights programs. The best available data for those two programs is shown below, reflecting the collaborative work of the GRYD Foundation and the City. Please note the research and evaluation team counts the number of visits, participants, and meals served, rather than the number of unduplicated individuals served. The rationale for this data approach is twofold: 1) the number of visits to the program sites and participation in activities are indicative of perceived safety and comfort over the course of summer; and 2) the sheer difficulty of accurately tracking 700,000+ individuals makes it prohibitive to count unduplicated figures, given the available resources.

In the Summer Night Lights program, an estimated 719,027 visits were made by community members across 32 Summer Night Lights program sites from June to August 2019. This data reflects visits from June 26 to August 3, 2019, when 32 parks/recreations centers were open for extended hours Wednesdays through Saturdays. This data also reflects visits from August 9 to August 23, 2019, when 32 parks/recreation centers were open for extended hours two nights per week. Participation included the following: 449,392 healthy meals were served; 15,739 people participated in 586 art workshops; 630 people participated in community art nights; 11,008 people participated in sports activities; 1,046 people participated in 19 skills-based sports clinics; and 6,003 people participated in fitness classes.

An estimated 30,827 visits were made by community members across eight Fall Friday Nights program sites from September 16 to November 8, 2019. Participation included the following: 10,441 meals were served; 1,563 people participated in 56 art workshops; 177 people participated in five skills-based sports clinics; and 589 people participated in 43 fitness workshops.

The Youth Squad 360 program, which is year-round, served 90 unduplicated youth in 2019; 68 were new enrollments and 22 were carryovers from the prior year.

Questionnaires, interviews, and surveys conducted in 2019 demonstrated further results: increased perceptions of safety in the community, improved relationships between law enforcement and community members, increased knowledge of local resources, and improved outlook toward achieving educational and career goals. Youth reported increased confidence, leadership, outlook for the future, and readiness to pursue college, career, and health/wellness goals.

Moving forward, the GRYD Foundation Strategic Plan 2019-2023 calls for expansion of Summer Night Lights and Youth Squad 360 and diversification of funding sources.