Save the date? Why events alone will not stop youth violence

August 27 is a day I try to remember with great consistency. The reason is simple -- it's my mother's birthday.

And typically, there aren't multiple events on that day, or anyone's birthday. Normally, people try to work together, across lines of family and friends, neighbors and colleagues, and put together one big celebration, particularly as folks cross milestones like 40, 50 and beyond.

Can you imagine your birthday coming up, and your significant other, your best friend, and your close colleague all planned an event, a birthday party for you, but they were all at the same time but at different places?

It doesn't make sense. Sure you could be a party animal, and hop from house to house. But it might, just might make more sense if everyone came together and threw you one great big bash.

In fact, it would probably mean a lot to you to see your coworkers, your neighbors, your friends and your family all show up to show you some love -- together.

Well, while this analogy might not work for everyone, it seems to me that is the same problem we have when it comes to tackling youth violence in Norristown.

August 27 is not only my mom's birthday, but I'll be running around town to multiple events that supposedly target youth as they prepare to go back to school.

Parents Against Violence Everywhere (PAVE) will have an event at the Greater Norristown Police Athletic League; Tabernacle International Deliverance Church will have a youth and family fair in the church parking lot at Marshall and Barbadoes Streets; and Living Ground Ministries will have Family and Friends Day in Elmwood Park.

Each event is targeting youth, and offering fun, games, free food, and free giveaways of book bags or school supplies.

And to top it all off, the following day, Sunday August 28, it's like the party isn't over yet, witih UNITY DAY in MLK/Simmons Park, where we will do it all over again.

Now, please, please, please, don't miss the point.

We ought to support our youth, and celebrate them and offer fun activities for them. But really, should we make them troll all over town, with multiple conflicting events among organizations who could have done a bigger and better event if they had all worked together?

And what do we do after the party?

You know, I'm married, and I'll celebrate my fifth wedding anniversary this year. I love my wife, and I still look fondly at the photos of our wedding day. But you know, we never got the video done. And we never officially got a photo album.

We immediately jumped into the work of marriage. The day-to-day activities of communicating, sharing, paying bills, having date night, raising children. We had to get past celebration and honeymoon, to the hard work, the real work of building a life together.

And that's what our children really need -- us coming together to build infrastructure all year long that supports youth.

Let me give you just one example. When I lived in Washington, DC in the 1990s, an African American colleague asked me to volunteer in a program in which she volunteered. It is called Project NorthStar.

Project NorthStar, then and now, was a program that literally reached hundreds of mainly black and Hispanic youth, who lived in the District's only two women and family homeless shelters. You can imagine that homeless kids have many challenges, not the least of which was no stable place to live. Churches and groups often came to the shelters to do one-time events -- puppet shows, carnivals, face painting, they gave them school supplies. You get the picture.

But Project NorthStar was different. Very simply, Project NorthStar provided one night of tutoring per week for the ENTIRE school year for these kids. We also provided a meal. When I volunteered, I was asked to make a commitment for a full school year. I attended training classes from an educational specialist, and my Monday night schedule revolved around showing up at one of DC's elementary school cafeterias to work with my kid.

Now, sometimes the kids didn't show up. It was inevitable. The shelters had a limit on how long families could stay, and families could be in and out of shelters, depending on their circumstances.

I became attached to those young African American boys I worked with. Today, 15 years later, I still remember DeJuan and DeVaughn. I remember how they were in special education, and I had to learn specific techniques to work with a special education child. I remember talking with their mother, and sometimes taking them back to the shelter in my car, rather than letting them ride the bus.

I also remember trying to stay in touch with the family even after they moved out of the shelter and into an apartment, far away from where the shelter was.

It wasn't an event, it was an investment. It wasn't a celebration, it was a commitment. We had events, like a Christmas party, but it wasn't like that would be the first and the last activity we did with these kids. We were there week in and week out.

The black and white professionals (mainly lawyers) who came together to start this program were shocked they had to create a board, get 501 (c) 3 status, and grew to a budget of $250,000. But to sustain the work, and not a one-time event, required structure, leadership, measurable outcomes, proof of success and financial investment from public and private sources.

Mentoring programs like Project NorthStart, when done right, where folks are trained and committed, have been proven by research to improve the life outcomes of such kids. Programs that involve training and longterm commitment have been proven, over time, to reduce youth violence.

Rather than offering ourselves self-congratulatory citations because we threw a party for some young people, why don't we get to the hard work of building longterm programs that require organizational collaboration, financial investment, political will, evidence-based outcomes and personal commitment? Most importantly a strategy to reduce violence period in Norristown will require both vision and LEADERSHIP.

Don't you know every time I walk these streets on Friday and Saturday and talk with our youth, they still say they need something to do. Folks, their needs don't end when our one-time event ends. And their needs don't end when PAL and Carver and churches close their doors for the evening. Their needs are ongoing, and so our efforts have to be ongoing.

When August 29th rolls around, and the weekend is over -- who is going to help these kids use the school supplies they got? When the weekend is over, who is going to help these kids eat, if the best meals they had all week were at our events?

The social traumas, which give rise to youth violence, don't disappear because we all did the electric slide at a community party. If only life was that simple.

But it's not. Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey -- who is dealing with a much larger problem of youth violence than Norristown, put it best in a recent article, where he said, "people want easy solutions to complicated problems. Parenting is a part of this but not all of it. . . . It's not all the schools' fault."

I pray soon that these festivals and parties will mark only milestones in a year-long effort of the day-to-day hard work to reach young people, save as many as possible, and to remove from our community those who refuse to turn around. It's going to take grassroots organizations, churches, police departments, district attorneys, the school district, and it's going to take a commitment to stop fighting over a date, and who gets the money, and who is in charge, to submitting to the scrutiny of research, the proof of a track record, and the commitment of working together. After all, we are only a town of 3.2 square miles.

We have a complicated problem on our hands -- we are not called to save dates, we are called to save lives.