Nearly 20 years ago The California Wellness Foundation was one of the first organizations of consequence to promote the recognition that violence was not merely a crime problem. It was a serious public health issue.

As part of their focus on the topic, every year Wellness puts on a Violence Prevention Conference at which around 300 people drawn from all over the state gather to discuss the myriad complex facets of this problem that so deeply affects the health and well being of California’s communities.

Among those who attend are directors of programs that address some aspect of the issue, a smattering of law enforcement (This year Deputy Chief Pat Gannon, head of LAPD’s South Bureau, was on a panel), academics, researchers, and other experts in the field.

Each year at the conference, Wellness presents three Peace Prizes, which honor three people with a $25,000 cash award….”in recognition of his or her outstanding efforts to prevent violence and promote peace in their local communities.” The 2011 winners were Ray Balberan, Priscilla Carrasquilla, Manuel Jimenez, all of whom work in different capacities with former gang members and/or kids who are headed that direction. (You can read more about the winners here).

The topics vary from year to year. This year, the subject of realignment came up frequently in public discussions and in private conversation. Another big conference topic was juvenile probation. The Chiefs of Probation for Alameda and Yolo counties were both on a panel. In fact, Alameda County’s Chief of Probation, David Muhammad, was one of the conference’s two keynote speakers and his straight talk about what works and what doesn’t for lawbreaking kids had direct and urgent implications for LA County’s troubled juvenile camps. (I’ll have much more to say about David Muhammad in a later post.)

The other keynote speaker—the one who opened the conference—was LA’s own Father Greg Boyle.

I’ve posted some (very) rough iPhone video snippets from his speech. Please ignore the recurring hand-held jiggles and the less than felicitous framing, and just give yourself and treat and watch. As speakers go, they don’t get any better than Fr. Greg.

As the first clip below opens, Greg is talking about an encounter with a particular Homeboy Industries staffer. He also covers why he may title his next book “Barking with the Choir,” and why we must stand with the despised and the easily thrown away.

This next clip, #2, contains a story about homeboys and texting.

(NOTE: I turned off the video before the story of texting homeboys was over, so quickly switched it back on for the 55 second tag to the tale that you’ll find below.)

You’ll find one more instructive (and funny) homeboy story here in clip #4.

This next video opens with a short talke featuring the actress Diane Keaton at the Homegirl Cafe, and ends with…well…..just watch it.

Even for some reason you don’t want to watch to all six videos, do watch this last one, # 6. It’s only a little over five minutes long. I’ve heard Greg tell the story encased in the clip many times, but I still can’t hear it without crying off all my eye makeup. Thursday night was no exception.

Truth be told, I lived this story along with Greg. I was very close to the kid in the tale known as “Puppet,” and even closer to his girlfriend. I remember that Greg was out of state when all this happened. Thus I was the one who rushed to the hospital to hold down the fort, emotionally speaking, in those first hours.

Despite the pain of it, this story is—as are all Greg’s stories—about hope, and about why the issues talked about at last week’s conference matter so very much.

On Wednesday, the California Wellness Foundation announced it had named Kaiser Permanente executive Dr. Diana Bontá as President and CEO.

Why am I telling you this?

Because the Wellness Foundation is unique in California in that, for 19 years, it has funded—to the tune of $125 million— such projects as gang violence reduction programs, juvenile reentry strategies, and a long list of other juvenile justice issues when few others wanted to take a chance on the kind of at-risk populations that these essential programs served. In short, they have demonstrated their deep commitment to the problems and challenges that we crazy juvenile justice fanatics care about and, as a consequence, lives have been saved, futures altered for the better.

Thus when Wellness’s outgoing president, Gary Yates—always a champion of the foundation’s violence reduction initiatives— announced he was leaving, there was much discussion about whether the new Prez—whomever he or she was—would support the same kind of programs.

Word is that with Dr. Bontá, Wellness has found a winner, who, in addition to her executive experience, is a skilled and passionate advocate for the health and well being of the state’s underserved and marginalized communities and residents.

So, welcome to Dr. B!

If a gay teenager is living in a conservative community where the majority of the residents feel that there is something fundamentally wrong with him because of his sexual orientation, is he likely to be at higher risk for suicide than gay or lesbian kids living in a more socially supportive environment?

In the past, studies have indicated that gay, lesbian and bisexual teenagers try suicide at a significantly higher rate than heterosexual kids.

Yet there was no major empirical study that quantified the question of whether certain elements in a teenager’s social environment measurably increased or lowered the risk of suicide for LGB kids.

Until now.

After the rash of suicides among gay young men last year, Dr. Mark L. Hatzenbuehler of Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, with funding from the National Institute of Health (and others), decided it was time to find out what effects one’s social environment has on an LGB kid.

The results were published in Pediatrics Magazine on Monday.

Hatzenbuehler, who is a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholar and the new study’s lead investigator, examined the responses 32,000 Oregon 11th grade students who filled out questionnaires in the state’s yearly Oregon HealthyTeens survey between 2006 –2008. (Around one-third of Oregon’s 11th graders took part in the survey.)

Hatzenbuehler chose Oregon as his study site because it is one of the few states that asks kids about their sexual orientation on these yearly statewide surveys.

The study found that LGB youth were more than five times as likely to have attempted suicide in the previous 12 months, as their heterosexual peers (21.5 percent–or 1 in 5 LGB kids— vs. 4.2 percent, a little over 4 out of 100).

So would those figures change in a more supportive environment?

Hatzenbuehler developed five measures of the social environment surrounding LGB youth that included: 1) proportion of schools in the county with anti-bullying policies specifically protecting LGB students; 2) proportion of schools with Gay-Straight Alliances; 3) proportion of schools with anti-discrimination policies that included sexual orientation; 4) proportion of same-sex couples residing in the county and 5) proportion of Democrats in the county. (“Democrats” were used as a surrogate measure for a more socially liberal environment.)

In order to more accurately isolate the affect of the social environment, Hatzenbuehler controlled for other known risk factors like depression, binge drinking, peer victimization, and physical abuse by an adult.

The results of the study showed that LGB kids living in a “supportive” social environment attempted suicide 20 percent less frequently than kids in an “unsupportive” environment.

The heterosexual kids were also affected, and tried suicide 9 percent less in the positive social environment.

“The results of this study are pretty compelling,” said Hatzenbuehler in a statement. “When communities support their gay young people, and schools adopt anti-bullying and anti-discrimination policies that specifically protect lesbian, gay, and bisexual youth, the risk of attempted suicide by all young people drops, especially for LGB youth.”

Put more simply: the words and attitudes of those with whom our kids come in contact matter bigtime. Those words and attitudes can, for some young men and women, mean the difference between life and death.

NOTE: When news of the study came out on Monday, various news outlets scurried to find out what other experts thought. Here are some of the responses:

The AP reported:

Michael Resnick, a professor of adolescent mental health at the University of Minnesota’s medical school, said the study “certainly affirms what we’ve come to understand about children and youth in general. They are both subtly and profoundly affected by what goes around them,” he said, including the social climate and perceived support.

Health.com reported:

“While there are a small number of prior studies that have demonstrated that school climate makes a difference for LGB students, this study is important because it extends our understanding to the broader surroundings of the community in which students and schools are situated,” said Stephen T. Russell, a professor and director of the Frances McClelland Institute for Children, Youth and Families at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

MEANWHILE LEE BACA REACHES OUT TO MUSLIM COMMUNITIES WHILE LA TIMES ROBERT FATURECHI FOLLOWS THE SHERIFF ON HIS EAST COAST TOUR

Read the story here.

Mother Jones lays it all out. Here’s the deal:

In the past year, California has experienced the worst whooping cough outbreak in more than 50 years, an epidemic that has killed 10 infants and resulted in 6,400 reported cases. But even as the state’s public health officials have struggled to curb the disease, Republicans in Congress have proposed slashing millions in federal funding for immunization programs. Public health advocates warn that these cuts threaten efforts across the country to prevent and contain infectious and sometimes fatal diseases. And they add that lower vaccination rates could eventually result in more outbreaks that endanger public health at a major cost to taxpayers.

The House GOP’s 2011 budget would chop $156 million from the Centers for Disease Control’s funding for immunization and respiratory diseases. The GOP reductions are likely to hit the CDC’s support for state and local immunization programs, the agency’s ability to evaluate which vaccines are working, and its work to educate the public about recommended vaccines for children, teenagers, and other susceptible populations. The CDC especially focuses on serving lower-income families who receive vaccines at state and local health offices and community health clinics, rather than a private doctor’s office.

“When there’s less money, fewer kids get vaccinated,” says Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association….

Is everyone losing their minds? We can’t cut defense spending, and had to extend the Bush tax cuts, but we’re going to slash federal funds for low-cost immunization for kids? Really? Does that seem like a smart thing to do?

AND IN OTHER NEWS….

FOUR LINES OF CODE THAT SENT THE NYT’S NEW PAYWALL TUMBLING

Joshua Benton at the Neiman Journalism Lab reports that:

The New York Times paywall is costing the newspaper $40-$50 million to design and construct, Bloomberg has reported.

And it can be defeated through four lines of Javascript.

Read the rest.

AND WHILE WE’RE TALKING ABOUT NEWS AND MEDEA:

FOX NEWS SLAMS REUTERS PREPOSTEROUSLY AND REUTERS’ NIC ROBERTSON SLAMS BACK WAY HARDER

As Jay Rosen pointed out, What Nic Roberston is basically saying here is that the Fox crew in Tripoli is too scared to leave their hotel… Watch it.

The California Wellness Foundation’s annual Conference on Violence Prevention took place on Tuesday and Wednesday of this week, with the idea of policy-talking, idea exchanging and, of course, networking—with a bit of sideline gossip thrown in (human beings being….well…human).

There were people in town for the two day event from D.C. representing the various parts of the Department of Justice, specifically those who concern themselves with, not the law enforcement end, but the programatical side of addressing gang violence. Among those in attendance were Thomas Abt from the Office of Justice Programs (OJP), and Louis Tuthill from the National institute of Justice (NIJ)—which is basically the research arm of the DOJ.

Still the group was not without it’s smattering of law enforcement types; Special Agent John Torres from the ATF was there, along with a cluster from LA County probation and some deputy police chiefs.

Naturally there were folks from city governments, local and out of state. Among the LA contingent who came there was City Council member Tony Cardenas, and Guillermo Cespedes, LA’s Deputy Mayor who heads up the city’s gang violence prevention and intervention programs.

PLUS there were academic experts like my friend Jorja Leap from UCLA’s School of Public Affairs, Angela Wolf from the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, Barry Krisberg from Berkeley’s Center of Criminal Justice—and so on and so on.

But outnumbering the policy wonks and research minds, were the heads of organizations doing ground level work in the world of violence prevention, most of them working with the gang issue in some way or another—people like Dawn Brown from Girls & Gangs, Aquil Basheer, who was one of this year’s Peace Prize recipients, Blinky Rodriguez and Bobby Arias from Communities in Schools. Skipp Townsend from 2nd Call, Carol Biondi who is involved with Camp David Gonzales (among other places)….and many more.

Even Alex Sanchez, from Homies Unidos, was there on Tuesday night, when he seemed to be constantly surrounded with clusters of well-wishers, most of whom had not seen him since before his arrest on RICO charges in June 2009.

If there was one theme to the panels, side meetings and spontaneous ad-hoc discussions that took place during the nearly two-days of the event it was a single question: what really works when it comes to solving the problem of gang violence?

By the time the conference ended—as might be expected—, the answer was still very much up for grabs.

Speaking personally, however, I came away with an armful of new stories, great new contacts and informants, and many new shards of inspiration—all of which will be informing posts here in the weeks and months to come.

USC’S NEON TOMMY REPORTER CALLIE SCHWEITZER CAUSES LA’S PUBLIC HEALTH GUY TO HIDE OUT

Yes I know my pals Marc Cooper and Kevin Roderick already mentioned this, but after reading two inexcusably fact-challenged stories by so-called experienced and professional journalists, this tale of the exploits of Callie Schweitzer and her fellow Neon Tommy reporters, bears repeating and further praising.

For the past several weeks, Annenberg grad student Schweitzer and some of the other reporters working with her have been trying to have a brief conversation with L.A. County Director of Public Health Jonathan Fielding, about the county’s H1N1 deaths, and Fielding has reportedly dodged the calls.

Schweitzer and pals were working on a major package that looked at swine flu deaths across LA and analyzed what those deaths might suggest in terms of patterns.

As the main public health guy for LA, one would think that Fielding should get on the phone with the Neon Tommy reporters, given the nature of their investigation. But in any case, he didn’t. Who know, maybe he was always really, really busy.

But that’s not the weird part.

The weird part is the fact that, this past Tuesday when Neon Tommy’s Callie was booked by Warren Olney’s producers for Olney’s Which Way LA? radio show, they also booked Fielding—WHO ONLY AGREED TO BE ON THE SHOW if he was on air when Callie Schweitzer was off.

Are you serious????

Now, keep in mind WWLA? is not exactly some kind of talking heads free-for-all such as one frequently sees among the so-called “professionals” on cable TV news.

Warren runs a tight (and reasonably polite) ship. So it is not that Fielding had to worry that the intrepid grad student was going to put him in a metaphorical choke hold. (Although she is not my student, Schweitzer doesn’t strike me as the choke hold type anyway. She seems rather, you know, smart and competent.)

Now Callie Schweitzer and the Neon Tommy reporting group have written an open letter to Mr. Fielding. Which you can find right here (along with a podcast version of the WWLA? show in question).

I recommend you read the whole thing. It’ll cheer you up.

So why can I not possibly be pessimistic about the future of journalism in the face of all the massive circulation drops, layoffs and publications closings? Because of terrific young reporters like Callie Schweitzer. (This prominently includes the two classes full of smart and enthusiastic young men and women I am lucky enough to teach on Tuesdays and Fridays—at Annenberg and at UC Irvine.)

SCHWARZENEGGER COMPLIES WITH JUDGES ON PRISON POP REDUCTION—(SORT OF)

After the panel of three federal judges, led by U.S. Court Judge Thelton Henderson, rejected the state’s last proposal to comply with the panel’s requirement that the governor come up with a way to reduce California’s prison population bu 40,000 prisoners, Governor Schwarzenegger is set to submit a new plan Thursday night.

And then he plans to tell the judges that his proposed plan isn’t legal.

If the discrepancy between the first statement and the second is giving you whiplash, keep in mind that the governor’s previous plan, submitted in September (and rejected in October) instead of reducing the population by the requisite 40,000, only dropped by little more than half that much, or 23,000.

Not surprisingly, that plan didn’t work at all for Judge Henderson and company.

Plus there is also the matter of the case that Arnold and Jerry Brown have filed before the U.S. Supreme Court contending that they don’t have to comply with the 3 judges’ demands at all anyway.

Michael Rothfeld of the LA Times has a good report on the intricacies of the story.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger tonight will give federal judges a road map to reducing state prison overcrowding that involves waiving some state laws so sentencing regulations can be changed and new private prisons built.

But the governor also will disavow those solutions as illegal, said Oscar Hidalgo, a spokesman for the
California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

An initial plan that Schwarzenegger submitted was rejected three weeks ago by the three judges, who threatened him with contempt of court for failing to meet their demand for a proposal to reduce the inmate population by 40,000 prisoners over two years.

With his new proposal, the governor appears to be trying to avoid open defiance of the judges without giving the impression that he is contradicting his opposition to their efforts in an appeal now pending before the U.S. Supreme Court.

The new plan, which the governor says would reduce the prison population by 42,000 by December 2011, will heed the judges’ Oct. 21 order to identify state laws that they would need to suspend to meet their goal.

Yet Schwarzenegger also is expected to tell the judges he does not believe it would be legal for them to waive those laws. He contends that it is improper for the federal courts to intrude into the state’s affairs.

DOUGLAS RING

Real estate investor and attorney Douglas Ring—also the former husband of city council woman, Cindy Miscikowski, was found dead in his Brentwood home Thursday. Police are investigating Ring’s death as a possible suicide.

LEGISLATING CHRISTMAS

A new initiative that may or may not be headed for next year’s ballot would require—-not allow, require—California public schools to have their students sing Christmas carols.

The LA Times’s editorial handles the militantly batty matter with exactly the right touch. Here’s a representative clip:

Merry Susan Hyatt, the substitute teacher who is spearheading the petition drive, is optimistic that she can garner the 434,000 signatures required to put the initiative on the ballot. “We got 25 signatures in just two nights,” she gushed to the New York Times. At that rate, we can expect the Christmas carol referendum in about 95 years — assuming those Grinches at the American Civil Liberties Union don’t sidetrack it in the courts. (It is, of course, blatantly unconstitutional, favoring as it does not only religion but a particular faith.)

Next step. The Senate.

One of the models being talked about for its importance to journalism’s future is the collaboration between journalism schools and public news organizations, particularly non -profits.

Today, Thursday, Neon Tommy, one of the student run online publications coming out of the Annenberg School of Journalism demonstrated a case in point with their exploration and analysis of swine flu deaths in LA County, yet did it without the aid of an outside news agency.

Around 30 students worked on the package, which consists of an overview of the deaths, what they suggest in the way of patterns and a sharp look at LA County’s shifting policy of secrecy about its records, portraits of seven of those who have died, plus a legal analysis of what LA County and other counties in the state have an obligation to tell us about who exactly is dying from the swine flu. (There is also a map of where the deaths occurred in the county.)

Just to give credit where credit is very much due, the students who worked on the swine flu package are the following.

Reporting staff: Hillel Aron, Briana Galper, Catherine Cloutier, Sharis Delgadillo, Bethany Firnhaber, Jessica Flores, Michael Green, John Guenther, Stephanie Guzman, Neila Jamee, Julia James, Olga Khazan, LeTania Kirkland, Len Ly, Meghan McCarty, Jaclyn Matthews, Jonathan Polakoff, Natalie Ragus, Walter Redmond, Rob Schwandt, Madeleine Scinto, Callie Schweitzer, Amy Silverstein, Susannah Snider, Amanda Tran, Christine Trang, Jessika Walsten and Kelly Williams.

Editors: Mark Evitt and Richie Duchon

Map design: Kim Nowacki

By the way, just so you know, to my knowledge, this project was not part of a class assignment for anyone. (I know it wasn’t for those of my students who worked on it.) The Annenberg reporters simply did the work in their spare time because they wanted to learn and believed the reporting was important.

The fate of the California state parks is still up in the air. 100 out of the state’s 279 parks are slated to be closed to help shore up the budget gap. Park funding was yanked by Governor Schwarzenegger in a unilateral move when the legislature refused to pass the cuts he thought were necessary.

When and if the drastic shuttering takes place, Arnold Schwarzenegger will be the first governor in California history to close a state park in order to save money.

This week State Parks officials said that they aren’t exactly sure which 100 parks will be closed as making that list has turned out to be more complicated then anyone quite realized.

Yet there is a ballot measure that will go on the November 2010 ballot. If passe it will raise vehicle license fees $15 to raise $400 million a year, and fully fund the parks and then some, reports the San Jose Mercury News.

Environmental organizations such as the Nature Conservancy, National Audubon Society, Trust for Public Land, Save-the-Redwoods League and others have raised nearly $1 million and conducted months of polling toward getting the measure on the ballot.

In a serendipitous bit of timing, to remind us of the importance of our public open spaces, Ken Burns’ new documentary “National Parks: Americas Best Idea,” premiers this month on PBS and KCET. It was filmed over a period of six years.

To help focus attention on the series, California civil rights lawyer, Robert Garcia, who is also the Founder and Executive Director of The City Project, will be guest blogging for KCET about the importance of our region’s national, local and—of course—our imperiled state parks.

There are few in the state more knowledgeable on the issue, or more impassioned.

Here is an opening clip from his first essay.

Wallace Stegner, the Stanford writer and historian, famously wrote national parks were “the best idea we ever had.” “Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst.” National parks continue to diversify what it means to be American and democratic.

You can read the rest here.

The above photo is of kids from the Anahuak Youth Sports Association hiking in Franklin Canyon as part of a project called Transit to Trails.

A quick break from reporting on sad LA issues:

Yesterday afternoon, I talked at length with one of California’s legislative analysts in order to find out how he thinks the state can slash the necessary 1.2 million of the CDCR budget.

I’ll get to all this later today. Right now fatigue is making me too fuzzy-headed to make sense of it. In the meantime…..

Tuesday’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross was about the proposed health care plans. The guests were two economists—one conservative, one liberal. The liberal was Paul Krugman. The conservative was Heritage Foundation Vice President Stuart Butler

They were both wonderfully informative and each had very interesting points to make.

I guarantee you’ll come away feeling smarter, with a better grasp on the issues than when you tuned in.