Sarah Raskin, Division of Violence Prevention, CDC
Kat Aaron, The Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project

Job training has been identified as a powerful strategy to reduce youth gang violence. This article examines the emerging practice of youth-serving social microenterprises: Asset-based programs that aim to reduce economic disadvantage and give young people the opportunity to learn skills and find employment.

With the world ahead of him, teen is gunned down.

--Headline from the Boston Globe, August 2005

For more than a year, U.S. news media have reported on a possible resurgence of youth gang violence, its diffusion from large cities to rural communities, and its possible connections with international terrorism. Youth gang violence is believed to have contributed significantly to the most recent epidemic of youth violence in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Unfortunately, it is difficult to ascertain the true magnitude of youth gang violence and its contribution to the overall problem of youth violence. Not only is there a lack of consensus amongst experts and across sectors as to what constitutes a gang; existing data systems also lack sufficient detail to allow precise tracking of gang-related violence.

What we do know, however, is deeply disturbing: while homicide rates among 10- to 29-year-olds declined substantially in the last decade (16.4/1000 in 1993 to 9.8/100,000 in 2002), recent evidence suggests that these rates are rising again. And, as in the previous epidemic, gang violence appears to be playing an important part.

Nonetheless, we learned essential lessons from the recent epidemic. Despite our unanswered questions, many promising prevention and intervention strategies exist for reducing youth violence and gang violence. Asset-based programs may help to minimize risk factors, like poverty, and maximize protective factors, like youth participation in conventional activities. Job training is one such activity that has been endorsed by the U.S. Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention within its comprehensive community approach to youth gang violence.

Social Microenterprise: A Tool for Violence Prevention
Related to but distinct from traditional job training programs is an emerging practice called social microenterprise. Social microenterprises are mission-oriented small revenue or job-creating projects undertaken by individual social entrepreneurs, nonprofit organizations, or nonprofit-for-profit partnerships, to serve people of modest means. Youth-serving social microenterprises are asset-based programs that, consistent with Community Youth Development paradigms, aim to reduce economic disadvantage while developing young people's skills and engaging their creativity, vibrancy, camaraderie, and commitment.

Youth-serving social microenterprises are asset-based programs that, consistent with Community Youth Development paradigms, aim to reduce economic disadvantage while developing young people's skills and engaging their creativity, vibrancy, camaraderie, and commitment.

The Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project, a social and economic justice organization in New York City, convened in June 2005 diverse youth-serving organizations that blend social microenterprise with violence prevention and intervention to examine this emerging practice. Meeting participants shared evidence of success such as significantly increased high school graduation rates among program participants; discussed quantitative and qualitative program outcome measures such as reduction of violence, gang desistance, skills learned, and increased community engagement and activism; and identified the position of their respective programs along a continuum of youth-serving social microenterprise program types. A sign of increasing interest in the field was the substantial support the conference received from foundations and major financial institutions. A report on the conference, including best practices and organizational profiles, is forthcoming.

Youth-serving programs using social microenterprise as a tool for violence prevention operate along a continuum of practice. At one end are more traditional social service organizations, for which job skills training and employment are two of many strategies in preventing youth violence (including gang violence). These organizations, which operate within traditional zero-sum non-profit budgets, are committed to providing as many employment opportunities to young people as possible.

At the other end of the continuum are business models, based on self-driven-sustainability and capital growth through generating income via client contracts and other business activities. The income generated funds job placement services, life skills mentorship, and other tandem services that have been traditionally the domain of social services. The social services model is evaluated with regard to youth development outcomes; the business-driven model is evaluated with regard to both youth development and business development outcomes.

One end of the continuum: Homeboy Industries. An example of an organization at the traditional social services end of the youth-serving social microenterprise continuum is Homeboy Industries. A self-identified violence prevention organization, Homeboy Industries gives at-risk and gang-involved youth an opportunity to learn skills and find employment. According to Father Gregory Boyle, one of the organization's founders and leaders, gang members are "eager to accept an alternative to the dangerous and destructive life on the streets." The California Wellness Foundation has recognized Homeboy Industries' former incarnation--Jobs For a Future--as a program that works.

Business development is but one strategy through which Homeboy Industries achieves this goal; it also offers free education, training, job placement, mental health and social services counseling, life skills training, and a tattoo removal service that has a waiting list of over a year.

Despite the many barriers to employment that members of this community face--such as former gang involvement, criminal records, limited or no English language ability, substance abuse, visible tattoos, and limited education and employment skills -- Homeboy Industries welcomes . . . even the most "difficult to place" individuals.

Homeboy Industries was originally established as a program of the youth-serving community organization Proyecto Pastoral to fill an unmet need --legitimate employment--in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles. Despite the many barriers to employment that many members of this community face--such as former gang involvement, criminal records, limited or no English language ability, substance abuse, visible tattoos, and limited education and employment skills -- Homeboy Industries welcomes citizens from Boyle Heights and from greater Los Angeles. From its first venture, a bakery, to thriving silk-screening, embroidery, landscaping, maintenance, and merchandising businesses, Homeboy Industries opens itself to even the most "difficult to place" individuals, who develop skills and build resumes in a non-stigmatizing environment.

Sidebar 1 A Model for Success

Homegirls. Homeboy Industries hopes to soon launch the Homegirl Café, an initiative that reflects, and responds to, the experiences of gang-involved young women--a little-understood group that seems to be expanding and whose unique needs - especially as mothers whose children are at high risk for gang involvement--have been largely ignored.

Homeboy Industries articulates its legacy in terms of a multiplier effect, consistent with other social microenterprise organizations that work with young people: i.e., that increasing a participant's economic viability and constructive social participation positively impacts that participant's partners, parents, children, community, and society at large.

The other end of the continuum: Homeboyz Interactive. Halfway across the country in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, united in the philosophy that "nothing stops a bullet like a job," Homeboy Industries' "sibling" organization, Homeboyz Interactive, represents the other end of the youth-serving social microenterprise continuum. Homeboyz Interactive identifies itself as a technology-training program and business that empowers young people to succeed in technology-rich work situations. Operating on a hybrid business and social service model, Homeboyz Interactive evaluates its success using two frames: 1) individual and community level indicators such as job placement and youth violence rates; and 2) business indicators such as revenue generated through grants and work contracts.

Founded in 1996 to "reduce gang violence and provide young people with skills and expertise in Information Technology (IT)," Homeboyz Interactive responds to a community-identified need for exciting, reliable, and economically rewarding alternatives to gang participation in a rapidly-expanding employment sector that local young people might not otherwise access due to disparities in education and technology.

Led by a diverse group of professionals with experience in business, IT, and social service, Homeboyz Interactive is a web development business that trains and employs young people in digital media, software development, and network administration. Homeboyz Interactive utilizes project-based learning, in which students apply newly learned skills to actual client projects. Students are not compensated until they have completed their initial training program, but training is free. With a teacher to student ratio of one to four, staff impart technical and life skills within an environment that is rich in community and mentorship.

In addition to employing students and graduates in its in-house IT business, Homeboyz Interactive gives its graduates job placement and small business incubation support.

Homeboyz Interactive students are referred by prior students, clients, community leaders, parole offices, faith-based leaders, and other non-profit organizations, and are invited to join the program following an interview process. Program staff monitor students' progress in both technical and life skill development, and students must pass competency exams as they narrow their focus and deepen specific skills. Students are predominantly male, range in age from 18 to 28, and comprise many different ethnic backgrounds. Nearly all come from low-income families, one-third are employed in low-wage work, and nearly half have a criminal record. Ninety-six students have completed the program since 2000. Homeboyz Interactive anticipates that "that number will likely increase due to the demand that is being presented by several different sectors of society, including high schools, IT service providers and community centers." The majority of program graduates now work in IT. Many have returned to secondary or post-secondary school.

What's Next?
Homeboyz Interactive and Homeboy Industries are two examples of youth-serving social microenterprise; a promising youth violence prevention and intervention strategy that is especially relevant if reports of a re-emergence of youth gang violence prove to be true. Organizations like these are uniquely poised--and uniquely willing--to work with the most stigmatized youth, who battle significant barriers to accessing mainstream youth-serving organizations. Research--in particular, mixed-method, participatory research that encourages the participation of the young people who are served as well as other community members--is needed to evaluate youth-serving social microenterprise as a violence prevention strategy. The evaluation process must emerge quickly, as the proportion of "at-risk" young people increases and as education, socioeconomic, and opportunity gaps between the "haves" and "have-nots" continue to broaden.

Authors

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Sarah Raskin is a fellow in the CDC Division of Violence Prevention, where she researches special topics in youth violence prevention. A former community health educator in southern Appalachia and intervention specialist in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, she earned an MPH in International Community Health and Development and a Certificate in Human Rights from Emory University, where she received the Gangarosa Award for "creative approaches to global public health problems." Sarah has presented on topics including a comparative analysis of sexual violence in conflict settings, intersections between HIV and intimate partner violence, and rights-based approaches to violence prevention. In her spare time she volunteers with the Atlanta Harm Reduction Center, logs lots of miles with her dog Scout, and works with fifteen collaborators on a semi-documentary play called "Women and War," which President Jimmy Carter has called "a rich example of the social power of cultural arts (that) reflects the importance of pursuing peace around the globe." Sarah hopes to begin a Ph.D. program in Medical Anthropology in September 2006.

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Kat Aaron (kat@nedap.org) is the Communications Director at the Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project, or NEDAP. At NEDAP since 1999, in 2003 Kat initiated NEDAP's youth program, Resources for Youth Seeking Economic Justice (RYSE) (www.nedap.org/ryse). RYSE provides workshops, research training, and organizing support to youth activist groups in New York City. Kat is also a producer at WBAI 99.5 FM, a community radio station in New York City.

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The views in this article are those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.