Recommendation to receive and file a presentation from VoiceWaves Long Beach on Youth Justice Research.
Ocean carries. 18. Adam, 18, is communication from Council Member Pearce recommendations received via a presentation from Voice Waves Long Beach on Youth Justice Research. Thank you and good to you. Here is Chan Hobson here. Okay. Okay. So, no, there's there is no comment. Customer reports. Yes. Thank you. We're going to receive and file a presentation from Voice Waves, a youth led journalism and media training program of Youth Leadership Institute, a statewide youth leadership and development nonprofit voice wave partners with Long Beach youth from the ages of 15 to 25, whose goal it is to raise awareness on community issues within our local neighborhoods. Trainings include digital photography, video radio, social media to engage community on important local issues. With this platform, youth are provided a creative outlet to be a vital part of our community. So we've invited them here today to give us a brief presentation, and I am very happy to say I attended their presentation. Oh three, four. Months ago in June and it was a packed house of youth and their families and just felt like the kind of community space that we wanted to make sure we brought up some of the work that they've done. So thank you, guys. Blunt speak on. Yeah. 1/2. Oh, sorry. Okay. Do they have their clicker? Okay. Okay. How do we use this? How exactly do we use this? Sorry, I just want to. Okay, cool. Hi. My name is Carlos. This is Michael Lozano. As the councilwoman said, we're representing voice lives and Youth Leadership Institute. And we're here to talk about some of the findings that we got from data we collected as a part of the My Brother's Keeper initiative. Here we go. So the My Brother's Keeper initiative was launched in 2014 to address opportunity gaps faced by young males of color and with the support of the Long Beach Department of Health and Human Services. Youth from Voice Waves and Youth Leadership Institute created a survey and a short form documentary to highlight how these issues exist today on the local level. And so we started this process in February and finished it up in June. And during that time, what you see on the screen where some of the headlines kind of just detailing some of the events that were happening at the time, that kind of. Expose youth to getting involved with the criminal justice system. And throughout the process, we also recorded a podcast featuring a discussion about preventing youth from getting involved with the justice system. This featured community experts such as members of Black Lives Matter. And like our documentary, this can be found on the voiceless website. Voice leads dot org, not dot.com. So our survey, we received a total of 197 responses from youth in Long Beach, and the survey was crafted by the youth involved in the My Brother's Keeper project under the Supervision of Wildlife staff. Our goal with the survey was learn more about the mental health needs of youth both before and during their involvement with the justice system. And as you can see above, a lot of our youth that were surveyed reported being between the ages of 14 and 18. Some were older than that. And they also reported mostly not having a job or being part time workers. And being on free and reduced lunch. Questions about. Give me a second. So questions about gender and about race are both left open ended. As you can see, gender there was a pretty even split with people identifying as male and female, almost 5050. And then with race, the majority of our responders were Hispanic or Latino. But I think there's a pretty good mix that represents the diversity of our city. Most of the world, not most say a lot of the youth. Have had their lives impacted by the criminal justice system. Either they themselves have been involved personally or they know someone who has a lot of their involvement involved, having been interacting with school officials or law enforcement. And we. Sorry about that. Among one of the most startling findings that we got from the survey is that 63% of the youth participants had experienced what they described as extreme stress or trauma in some frequency, with 31% of those youths saying that they experiencing it daily or weekly. And survey participants were also asked to describe how they cope with trauma and other negative emotions. On the screen, you'll see the most popular responses to that question. And for the rest of the presentation, I'm going to turn it over to Michael. Yeah. Cool. Thanks, Carlos. So just to reiterate what Carlos was saying, it's clear that some youth in Long Beach, many youth, too many youth face a high frequency of trauma and intense stress in their weekly or daily lives. That's self-reported by the youth and lobbyist themselves. So given the stress, given the negative life events that occur in their lives, we have to ask the question like, where should youth go to find that release? And so the five most common coping mechanisms that youth reported. Number one was sleep. Number two was talking to friends. And the third most common coping mechanism was creative arts and music. If we notice actually as we engage in this conversation, we're going to realize how important it is to talk to your friends, that this idea of talking, this idea of socialization among young people is really important , especially when we talk about how young people cope with negative, negative emotions such as anger, sadness, anxiety or stress in their lives. So talking to friends is going to be an important factor for the following reasons. A separate question asked youth of all these different coping mechanisms that you rely on, which coping mechanism do you believe is the most effective? So by and large, you said that talking is the most effective way to deal with stress and trauma. Here's the problem, though. Only 17% of you said that they could talk to their parents or family about their negative emotions. There are negative life events or traumas. Only 9% said they could talk to a trusted community member. What about talking to a teacher or counselor? Only 2% of youth said they could do that. 2% out of 197 students. Young people are youth in Long Beach. We talked about what coping methods are most common and which are most effective in reducing stress and trauma. Now we're talking about frequency. Well, talk is important. So how often do youth get to actually talk about their emotions to other people? Unfortunately, we did have to find that one in three youth never talked to anyone about their emotions. Excuse me 1/2. Another 25%. Express themselves to others only every few months. Or a few times a year. Adding on to that, there's a lot of youth who say that there's not many places for them to go for help. Not many people to rely on for support. Given the issues, we actually didn't want one to just rely on like the trauma or focus on that, focus on the problems. We also wanted to focus on solutions. So these are some youth led solutions that the respondents came up with. We asked them, you know, on a scale from 1 to 4, what do you feel are the most effective resources in preventing youth from becoming justice involved? Number one, by far, having a supportive family. Number two athletics. Number three, access to jobs for youth. Number four, music, art and creative media programs. And there's a few other factors up there. That's the top ten, top ten ways that these respondents feel they could be prevented from getting involved in the justice system. The least effective methods. Youth probation. Youth prisons in school detention. Again, focusing on solutions, focusing on the future of limited youth. We thought it was important to come up with three recommendations given this important data that we came across. Increasing restorative justice resources and program visibility across Long Beach. What this what this does, it shifts our solutions, our way of thinking from punitive to conversations, which you said themselves. Conversations and talking is the key to healing is the key to prevention. And we also to a turn youth that are disengaged, that maybe don't find many resources across their community. They become engaged in the community by via restorative justice, via community programs. Recommendation number two, increasing mental health opportunities in schools for both students and their families. Because we saw such a low rate of students being able to talk to their families about their negative emotions. We think it's important to do family counseling in schools. And we have just about 50 seconds left just on the timer. Absolutely. Got you. What this does is shift silence youth from silence to conversation. And recommendation number three, we recommend supporting policy efforts at the local level, at local level that dismantle the school to prison pipeline that shifts our policies from punitive to preventative. For the sake of time. We could we could skip this. But if anyone is interested in a trilingual documentary featuring Long Beach youth and experts on these very issues, go to Tony. You are welcome. Youth Justice Doc. It's in English with subtitles in Spanish and come I made possible with support with the health department here in Long Beach. Thank you. Thank you very much. Councilman ringing. I want to thank you for making this presentation. You presented a lot of ideas there that I think many of us already know but need to reinforce, such as family and detention and probation, aren't real solutions towards dealing with issues that these may be encountering. So thank you for reinforcing that, and I certainly support your efforts. I thank you. And if I can be of any help to you as a mentor or as a person that can share experiences. I grew up in East Los Angeles. This is an example. I was surrounded by many gang members and was even recruited to become one, which I didn't. And my diversion with sports is an example. So thank you for your presentation. Thank you. Pearce Yes. I'll be brief. I just wanted to first take a moment to thank the council members that brought together My Brother's Keeper before I believe Council Member Richardson might have worked on that. So I saw that in the first slide and thought about how much work has been done to get to this point, to get funding for organizations doing this great work while its youth center. And I think it's really important that we as a city continue to talk about our youth as our constituents, and make sure that we as adults are talking about trauma and understanding that it is really hard for kids to talk to us as adults, as leaders in our community, as parents. And so anything we can do to partner with these guys more to talk about trauma informed practices, to talk about restorative justice, I think it's a great opportunity. So thanks for bringing. Thank you, Katherine Richardson. Thanks. I just wanted to just chime in and thank you both for coming out with the presentation. Look forward to talking with you and taking a deeper dove here. You know, you your organization and organizations like yours were the ones who were lifting up and talking about this work well before My Brother's Keeper. My Brother's Keeper came because there was a lot of focus from the White House, from the top that said, hey, we want to focus on this population. And now the leadership of the White House has changed. The national dialog has completely changed. And we're getting back to a lot of the rhetoric and the context that was had that happened prior to then. And what do we see? We see the same organizations that were here before carrying this message are the ones who are here now carrying this message. So I think it's important that while sort of our national discourse has changed, we continue to support the local organizations who are continuing to change the narratives around the circumstances and the lives of people who who, you know, boys and young men of color. So so thank you so much. I look forward to talking to you soon. Thank you. There's a motion and a second. Please cast your votes. Councilmember Richardson. Motion carries.