The children revealed the extent of the social problems in the neighborhood - hunger, violence, drugs, sexual predators. What could we do?
My team moved quickly in the days that followed. We set up several meetings at the neighborhood recreation center in the upcoming months. The data showed the neighborhood had severe social problems. We discovered that the community had the highest concentration of sexual predators living in an area with an extremely high percentage of children (40%). Along with drug addiction, poverty, and gun violence, the neighborhood was a ticking time bomb.
We decided to break the neighborhood into three groups of people based on age, children, teens, and adults. We contacted the local university and enlisted the help of the social work, art, anthropology, and planning departments. We talked with the police and got them interested in our efforts.
Well, ‘efforts,’ I use that word lightly. We were not sure what we were doing. Honestly, we were feeling our way through this one. It was undoubtedly a discovery process on a large scale. We enlisted Joseph, the civic association president, to help us get the people we needed to the meeting. We scheduled the children and teens on different days than the adults. We wanted unbiased feedback from the children and teens.
The university supplied social work students who designed a coloring exercise for the kids to understand the experience of their lives better. The social work students did likewise with the teenagers. The anthropology and planning departments suggested things to look for and approaches to take as we reached out to discover more about this neighborhood and the people who lived there. The police attested to the social problems the data revealed. Many police officers participated in the Police Athletic League (PAL), and some helped with book drives for the kids.
The day came quickly for our first meeting with the children and teens. We spoke with the recreation center staff, and they recounted stories of hunger and the plight of the children coming to the recreation center to play and get something to eat.
I polled my team. Forget bringing beverages and cookies to the meeting. Let us get something more substantial. Everyone on the team contributed money, and we brought sandwiches, milk, whole grain chips, fruit, and veggies. The ladies working at the rec center were on the verge of tears when they saw the food we brought.
We had the children eat first before we began, and many ate hungrily. Bellies full, they were ready to have some fun. Our newfound friends from the school of social work led the children and teens (two separate groups meeting at different ends of the hall) in fun exercises. The children colored pictures of their neighborhoods, what they saw, where they went, and who they met.
The meeting passed all too fast, and we released the kids and teens to play outside and have more fun. One of the social work students came up to me with a very disturbed look on her face. She showed me one of the children’s pictures of their neighborhood. There were two stick figures of people among the houses, the school, the recreation center, and the illustrations of friends. One had a gun pointed at the other. She showed me several other pictures where the kids had drawn a mysterious blue house that was dangerous and with a warning to stay away, as they told the student supervising the exercise. I recalled the data about the high concentration of sexual predators in the neighborhood and felt a growing alarm.
The teen exercise was more discussion based. Equally disturbing was the casual recounting of ‘regular’ events:
The drug dealers at the bus stop waiting for the school bus to sell drugs to the children and teens.
Recurring domestic violence in the household.
Wayward parents.
Latch-key kids.
Drug-addicted parents.
School absenteeism and school dropouts.
This news felt like a punch in the gut. These kids did not have a chance. They had no advocate, no role model, and no help. This backwater neighborhood in the middle of a large city isolated by a freeway on the east and large arterial roads bordering its other sides was quietly dying. I now understood the gravity of Joseph’s tears when he first sat across my desk in my downtown high-rise office. This neighborhood was quietly dying, and no one in the outside world knew or cared. Until now.
This story was originally published on May 13, 2021.
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Next week - Part 4, Into Action, in this month-long series, The Little Neighborhood That Could.
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