Hunters Point Family

The Hunters Point Family was founded by BVHP residents, specifically to serve “high-risk” and “in-risk” youth living in BVHP.  The agency has over 12 years of experience of intimate involvement with the various factors leading up to and resulting from youth violence/homicide.

“Participants (of HPF’s Bayview Safe Haven program) decreased school suspensions, recidivism, the seriousness of delinquent behavior and further involvement with the juvenile justice system.”[1]

HPF utilizes programmatic strategies that have not only been proven to work, they set the standard for youth development and juvenile delinquency programming for the nation.[2]

HPF has been recognized by the United States Senate, Assembly, and Congress for our work in violence prevention and mental health with “high-risk” youth.  Recently, HPF received the following awards and recognition: Certificate of Recognition for work in Violence Prevention from Senator Leland Yee; Certificate of Appreciation for work in Violence Prevention from Assemblywoman Fiona Ma, Majority Whip; Certificate of Recognition for efforts to address mental health from Senator Carol Migden; and Exceptional Programs and People Award for Promoting Mental Health for Youth, from the SF Dept. of Public Health.

The Hunters Point Family’s Bayview Safe Haven, GIRLS 2000, and Peacekeepers programs are currently funded by the Department of Children Youth and Families’ Violence Prevention Fund to support the City’s efforts to provide physical intervention and follow up services surrounding conflicts or violent incidences, and the promotion of positive behavioral modification.

Understanding the Context for Violence in Bayview Hunters Point:

The leading cause of death among San Francisco children in BVHP is homicide. According to the Trauma Foundation’s Profile of Injury in San Francisco, “homicide is primarily a problem of the young, as judged by the age of the victims. Young adulthood is a dangerous period for young black San Franciscans.” Violence is the leading cause of years of life lost in BVHP, as well as the leading cause for black men in San Francisco. African-American men ages 15-24 are at three times the risk of dying by firearms than Latino men in the same age group. Likewise, African-American men ages 15-24 are seven times more likely to die by firearms than Caucasian or Asian men in the same age group.[3] San Francisco averaged 64 homicides a year from 2000 to 2003. Since then, the average has been 93 a year – a rise of 45 percent. Statewide, killings were up less than 10 percent in the same period. In 2008, 80 percent of homicide victims in San Francisco were shot. Nearly half the victims were black, even though African Americans make up less than 6 percent of the city’s population.

San Francisco’s homicide rate only tells part of the story.  San Francisco’s General Hospital has the best trauma center in the nation, so that an increasing number of gun shot victims are surviving.   According to the University of San Francisco’s Department of Surgery, Violence Prevention Wrap-Around Project, “non-fatal injuries in San Francisco outnumber fatal injuries on the order of 100 to one.  San Francisco General Hospital Medical Center (SFGHMC), the only Level I Trauma Center in the city of San Francisco, treated 97% of the firearm victims; In San Francisco, adolescents (ages 15-24) have the highest rates of non-fatal violent injury, primarily involving assaults, resulting in hospitalization; In 2006, SFGHMC treated 228 gunshot victims. There were nearly three times as many gunshot victims in 2006 than there were only 5 years prior. Over half the victims in 2006 were under the age of 25.[4]

Hunters Point Family Participant Risk Factors

In a recent questionnaire distributed to participants in HPF programs, youth answered questions about violence in their lives and their perceptions of safety in different places. As detailed in the table below, at least two-thirds of the youth have beaten up/jumped/robbed someone, know someone who has been killed or shot, and/or have been in a physical altercation. Violence surrounds and permeates the lives of these young people to a shocking degree.

The Cycle of Violence

Community violence has a particularly devastating impact on young people because it challenges their basic belief that the world is safe, predictable, and controllable.  Community violence threatens formation of healthy attachments and erodes children’s capacity to experience trust, develop self-confidence and autonomy and is one of the strongest predictors of aggression among youth. Although much of the research regarding youth violence, particularly gang activity, focuses on peer pressure, a need for acceptance, and corrupted rites of passage rituals, violence among youth usually develops from more painful and desperate origins.  Adolescents who are victimized or humiliated often relieve it by lashing out, so that violence becomes a transcending experience   Thus, a cycle of destruction develops where children who are victimized by violence process the trauma through victimizing other children in their environment.

When fear and violence become the norm in a community, children are forced to make fight or flight decisions on a daily basis. These consistent stressors play a critical role in the development and maintenance of psychological problems. Persistent feelings of not being safe often result in a state of chronic threat, generating thoughts, feelings, and behavior characteristic of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) symptoms In fact, there is strong and consistent relationship between exposure to community violence and PTSD symptomatology.  More than one quarter of children exposed to trauma develop Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. This phenomena has reached such dramatic proportions that PTSD is becoming a common diagnosis among young, African American males throughout the country.

By their very definition, “at-risk” and “high risk” youth tend to lack a sense of safety and strong social supports.   However, while at-risk and high-risk are most at risk to succumbing to the pitfalls inherent in inner-city poverty, this population also demonstrates the most dramatic response to consistent support and healing opportunities.

Breaking the Cycle of Violence

Resilience is perhaps the single most important factor in determining a child’s adaptive success.  Children will adapt to any environment.  If they are born into a negative and destructive environment, they will adapt by developing negative and destructive traits.  If they are born into a positive environment that is nurturing and offers hope, they will develop motivation and good work habits.    Often times, the reality lies somewhere in between these extremes.

In many inner-cities where drugs and violence are prevalent, a predatory environment develops where residents must decide to become predators, prey, or develop a tough exterior so that potential predators will avoid them.  According to social researcher, Elijah Anderson (1982, 1992), children, particularly adolescent boys, “must learn to negotiate with the street culture to survive and are often forced to choose between the values and behaviors of the street and those that could lead to a better future.”  Children learn to become violent in an effort to command respect and decrease their own vulnerability.  Thus, attaining social competence in these environments will lead children to develop adaptive behaviors that are contrary to appropriate behaviors in mainstream environments such as school and the workplace.

Research indicates that adaptive success consists of covert mental health and overt social competence.  Covert mental health encompasses an individual’s self-esteem, self-confidence, self-efficacy, personal development, and self-actualization Social competence is the success of the individual to meet social expectations.  These very separate realms can often be difficult to reconcile, particularly if one is living in an environment that is characterized by destructive forces.

Many adolescents make a decision to adapt to the culture of their immediate surroundings and forfeit any hope of achieving mainstream success (a good job, education, buying a home, supporting a family, etc.) or adapt to mainstream social expectations and risk becoming ostracized by peers and victimized by predators within their neighborhood.  Most young people are not prepared or motivated to take on such a risky course of action.

In neighborhoods with the greatest community violence, adults often become afraid of adolescents because they are usually the perpetrators of crime and violence.  This contributes to a downward spiral of distrust and isolation between youth and adults.  As adults become more fearful, youth become bolder.  Ironically, within the problem lies the solution.  Adult caring and responsibility is essential to creating community connectedness.  It is incumbent upon adults in the community to take responsibility for shaping the social climate of the environment.  Indeed research supports that a strong network of familial and trusted, non-parental adults is the most powerful protective factor in reducing the effects of chronic community violence on young people.  The health and stability of neighborhoods are enhanced when residents perceive a sense of connectedness and caring among members, and when residents create and enforce norms of cohesion and civic ownership.

As adolescents perceive that adults care about them, they are more likely to accept social/community norms and trust in the safety of their environment (Rosenberg, et.al, 1989).  Because youth look to adults to model behavior, adolescent relationships with significant adults model positive behaviors and adaptive techniques while providing a living example of possibilities for the future (Kemper, 1968).

Hunters Point Family’s Violence Prevention Philosophy & Strategy

Throughout the years, HPF has refined our juvenile delinquency and intervention strategies as the issues our participants face evolve.  While there are many factors that contribute to violence and juvenile delinquency, the most effective way to intervene in destructive behavior is to provide support and nurturance, while developing young people’s positive leadership capacity.  If youth do not have a positive outlet to assert themselves, often times, they utilize their leadership abilities in negative and destructive ways.

Many of the young people who join our programs have a deeply ingrained distrust and lack of respect for adults.  Although they are reaching out for love and guidance, they fear being vulnerable.  They fear adults will violate them and betray their trust, but their presence in the program indicates that their need to reach for something positive is more powerful than their fear.  The result is a long process of testing the staff’s boundaries, love, and respect for them.  They test staff members’ integrity, their trustworthiness, and their motivation for working with them.

The youth test the staff’s commitment to them because the youth are hungry for a family connection. Many times staff are in the position of tempering years of abuse and neglect by being an example of a caring responsible adult. Often, the staff person is the sole example of responsible adulthood in a young person’s life: the staff person functions as surrogate parent, big brother or sister, confidant, advocate, disciplinarian, and mentor all rolled into one.  This is difficult role to fulfill for even one child; however, Hunters Point Family staff  members perform this role for over 50 children,  all clamoring for attention, love, and understanding.

The Hunters Point Family programs are modeled like extended families, emphasizing mutual support and interdependence as a way to overcome obstacles and transcend trauma.  When youth enter into an HPF facility, they feel safe, comfortable, and valued.  By developing respectful and supportive relationships with staff and other youth, participants can begin to develop a different way of thinking about their world. They begin to see that the world is stable and safe, and people can be loving and supportive.  When youth experience positive relationships with their peers and other adults, they begin to adopt these behaviors.  The family approach provides a context for developing healthy and supportive relationships because it presupposes genuine love and concern among staff and youth based on familial bonds.

Hunters Point Family programs are community resources that are staffed by members of the community or similar communities.  Participants are responsible to staff for their actions within and outside of the program, not because they have to be, but because they choose to be.  Because all Hunters Point Family programs are completely voluntary, a young person’s bond and connectedness to the people in their program, staff and other participants, is based on their own desire to be a part of a larger community.

In turn, staff must be genuinely concerned about the youth and develop supportive relationships with the youth because participants have the power to “vote with their feet.”  Unlike probation officers, group home child care workers, or social workers, the only reason that a young person is accountable to Hunters Point Family staff is because they choose to be.  This excites us, because it means that these young people are anxious to make their lives and neighborhoods better, and it encourages staff in the toughest moments of the “testing” they undergo with the youth. The essence of all Hunters Point Family programs is the strength of the relationship bonds.  Staff must display extraordinary compassion and commitment to helping youth develop and transcend their issues and youth must feel the same.  Transcending the gravity of these obstacles requires the corresponding ratio of positive energy.

In spite of HPF’s many achievements and success in working with some of the most difficult to serve youth in San Francisco, the agency has suffered through horrific tragedy.  Over the last four years, ten of our core participants have been murdered, with another 12 suffering multiple gunshot wounds, and in January of 2008, our beloved friend and Program Director of the Peacekeepers, Mr. Terrell Rogers, was murdered in front of his daughter’s basketball game in San Francisco.  These events forced the agency to reconceptualize the way we think about and perform our work.  Our youth are not just at risk of coming into contact with the criminal justice system, using drugs, dropping out of school, etc. Their consequences are more severe.  Our youth are dying.  They are witnessing murders of loved ones in front of their homes, they have felt their flesh singe as bullets pierced through their bodies, and many have had to contemplate the very real consequences of “an eye for an eye” revenge. The Hunters Point Family does not have the privilege of carrying out typical youth development or delinquency prevention work, the reality of circumstances necessitates that our work goes deeper.

HPF works to empower youth to discover their innate gifts and use their experiences to refine their character, so that they may experience transcendence and transformation.  Staff work with youth to set personal goals and develop a step-by-step plan to achieve them. Participants are provided with opportunities and encouraged to apply these skills to implement community projects, improve their grades, get along better with peers, maintain employment and achieve an overall sense of well-being.  These accomplishments transform youth from passive individuals who complain about their circumstances, to active participants in the creation of their life outcomes.

[1] American Youth Policy Forum.  Learning Around the Clock:  Benefits of Expanded Learning Opportunities for Older Youth. March 2009

[2] Harvard Family Research Project:  Review of Out-of-School Time Program Quasi-Experimental and Experimental Evaluation Results www.gse.harvard.edu/hfrp/projects/afterschool/resources/snapshot1.html – 73k

American Youth Policy Forum.  The Impact of Afterschool Programs on Personal and Social Skill:  Recent Findings from a Scientific Review   www.aypf.org/forumbriefs/fb110906.htm – 14k – Cached

National Dropout Prevention Center Network:  Essential Elements of Quality After-school Programs. www.cisnet.org/library/download.asp?file=CIS-NDPC_2006_01-30.pdf -

The Eisenhower Foundation.  Positive Youth Development:  A Review of the Research www.eisenhowerfoundation.org/pdfs/pydfinal.pdf

Blank, Susan.  Hours that Count: Using After-school Programs to Help Prevent Risky Behaviors and Keep Kids Safe www.tascorp.org/publications/catalog/HoursthatCount/Hours_That_Count.pdf.pdf

[3] http://www.surgery.ucsf.edu/sfic/Local.html#Anchor-HOMICIDE-14210

[4] San Francisco General Hospital Medical Center. Trauma Registry data Level I Trauma Center (December 2008)

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