Sharing ideas on youth safety in Santa Maria
Community feedback was the point of a public forum in Santa Maria Tuesday night as part of an ongoing effort by the Mayor’s Task Force on Youth Safety.
The goal of the public forum was to brainstorm ideas from all walks of life in the community on how to better serve and protect local youth and keep them out of trouble at a pivotal time in their lives.
“To get them off the streets and on the right path”, said one man who’s involved in youth boxing, “they are more aggressive you know, wrestling is good, MMA, boxing, its a giving them a way to get out their aggression you know.”
The public forum and community feedback is the latest development in the youth safety task force program which is creating a strategy and a plan to improve the lives of local at-risk youth and their families through a blend of prevention, suppression, intervention and re-entry.
“Soccer just kind of really came out ahead”, said forum participant Patricia Solorio of non-profit group Central Coast Future Leaders on ideas expressed Tuesday night, “just kind of the issues of having limited space.”
“There needs to be additional programs, more importantly outreach to parents”, added forum participant and Santa Barbara County Fifth District Supervisor Steve Lavagnino, “we need to have common ground and make it about all the kids and not just at-risk kids, we need to link resources and have youth realize their ambitions.”
The Mayor’s Task Force on Youth Safety is a collaborative effort of community leaders, local law enforcement, faith-based organizations, non-profits, local businesses and local government.’
“The conversation was brought up about how Parks and Recreation has a lot of services and how they are not utilized as much as they’d like to”, said another woman who participated in the community forum, “so how do we make the message get to the parents so that children participate, so for example they asked how many kids go to the Abel Maldonado (Community Youth) Center?”
The Task Force will continue to meet regularly over the next few months as it develops a youth safety strategy and plan developed by a special coordination team with the assistance of the California Cities Violence Prevention Network.
