This story is part four in the series Youth, Trauma, Trials, Time: a Deep Dive Into Youth and the Justice System. You can read the centerpiece story here and additional coverage here and here.
Gracie Perez-Vasquez, 16, has plenty on her plate, including attending Dater High School, prepping for the ACT — and working with a group of other young people from across the city to draft policy recommendations to present to city officials.
Vasquez is one of a number of young people involved in Cincinnati’s youth councils — groups of civically engaged students pushing to make a difference in neighborhoods that sometimes see big challenges.
Though she lives in West Price Hill, Vasquez is a member of the East Price Hill Youth Council, which launched last year along with another council in Lower Price Hill.
She describes the youth council process as “beautiful.”
“Normally, you’d see a lot of kids fighting,” she says. “I would have never thought a whole group of kids could be united and work with each other.”
The concept of youth councils has been growing over the last decade in Cincinnati. The first sprouted in Avondale in 2006. Another popped up in Madisonville in 2012. In 2016, the Urban League of Greater Cincinnati’s Community Police Partnering Center helped launch a collaborative youth council in Westwood and East Westwood with the community councils there. The next year, it expanded the model to Bond Hill, Walnut Hills, West End and Winton Hills.
The groups convene to talk about youth issues, tackle service-learning projects and work in their communities.
Demontez Blackmon, 16, is part of the Westwood youth council and also helped present juvenile justice recommendations in October. He’s enthusiastic about the program.
“It was very interesting,” he says, “because it’s something that I’ve never done — working with other kids and being around kids from other neighborhoods, seeing what they like and what their thoughts are about issues.”
Community Police Partnering Center Executive Director Dorothy Smoot says the councils are a way to bridge the gaps that young people sometimes find in their communities.
“We heard that there was a disconnect between young people and their communities,” Smoot said in an interview after a youth council session at the Urban League’s Avondale headquarters this summer. “Research will tell you that is one of the reasons for violence in the community. Young people need to feel safe, protected, loved, et cetera by their communities, and if you’re disconnected from a community, you’re not getting those feelings.
“Our vision is voice, choice and shared responsibility. To teach young people how to do those things, we also have to teach adults how to make space for those things.”
Adult members of Cincinnati community councils who work to supervise the youth councils agree. They say young people are capable of advocating for their interests and speaking their minds.
Connie Benton is a member of the Winton Hills Community Council who also works with the youth councils.
“I don’t want the youth council to be a place where people just talk at them,” she said at a recent meeting of youth council supervisors and supporters. “I want to see these young people rise up.”
The youth councils overseen by the partnering center are supported by the city’s human services funding earmarked for violence prevention measures. More may be on the way — the Cincinnati Recreation Commission would like to foster the councils in other communities around the city.
The work the councils have completed this year alone has been considerable. Representatives from various youth councils met bimonthly earlier this year to plan a Youth Summit that took place in July at New Prospect Baptist Church. That event drew scores of young people, as well as representatives from the City of Cincinnati, Cincinnati Police Department, the region’s legal community and more to talk about the relationship between young people and the justice system. Youth planned and facilitated the whole conference, with some assists from adults.
Some young people, including Vasquez and Blackmon, took that conversation a step further last month, presenting to city officials recommendations they have drawn up for addressing disparities in the region’s juvenile justice systems.
Those disparities are large — though about 30 percent of Hamilton County’s population under the age of 18 is black, 80 percent of those who find themselves in the county’s juvenile courts are black, CityBeat found in a deep dive into the juvenile justice system in September.
Similar racial differences ripple through other parts of the justice system and beyond. They can be found in the data charting police use of force, arrests in neighborhoods and schools and among those who become victims of violence. Many of the young people touched by those dynamics come from predominantly black neighborhoods with median household incomes well below the city’s as a whole.
That has a lot to do with socioeconomics, Smoot says.
“Where are the economic disparities but in communities where there are African American youth? Until the changes that are beginning to occur in Avondale, where were the resources?” she asks. “No stores. No places to work when you’re a kid. No places to go for children. They’re not in an environment that is economically conducive for making good choices. When you go to the neighborhood school that is not the magnet school, your opportunities are more limited, and your network is more limited. You don’t have the choices to do something different.”
How does a community address those disparities? Part of the answer involves asking young people themselves, youth council advocates say.
A program launched by the Children’s Law Center and funded by the Greater Cincinnati Foundation engaged 15 young people from various youth councils, who met every Friday over the summer to discuss those issues and come up with recommendations for city leaders.
Most of the group also had summer jobs but were compensated for their time. The group also received leadership training from Cincinnati-based youth engagement nonprofit Youth at the Center.
CLC Executive Director Acena Beck says the program has been a few years in the making, but that the timing has been critical this year.
A series of shootings involving teens as young as 14 focused the city’s attention on violence in some Cincinnati neighborhoods, making the input of young people in those communities even more vital, Beck says.
“Their voices are what matters,” she says. “We as adults are always assuming that we know what is best for youth and we know what they want. But a lot of times, we find that we’re wrong. This is a time when the city seems to be paying more attention, with the recent violence. So it’s the perfect time for them to weigh in. And all the youth we’ve worked with say they’ve never been asked.”
Six youth council members Oct. 16 presented their recommendations to Cincinnati City Manager Patrick Duhaney, Cincinnati Police Chief Eliot Isaac, Cincinnati Collaborative Agreement Sustainability Manager Jason Cooper and other officials.
Those recommendations included youth representation on the Collaborative Agreement-created Manager’s Advisor Group, which reviews continued implementation of the city’s landmark 2003 policing reforms. Youth also said they thought both young people and police could benefit from more training about how to engage with each other, more efforts to get police officers out into the community in non-enforcement situations and more diversion programs and other alternatives to the traditional justice system.
The city says it is taking those ideas seriously. A spokesperson said city officials are working on ways to implement key points made by the youth council members and will have more specifics about how it is doing so in the coming weeks.
Vasquez says the experience was valuable.
“It was exciting, being able to present in front of the city manager and the police chief because I look up to people like Martin Luther King and Cesar Chavez,” she says. “In my mind, youth are fighting for their voices to be heard… it’s an opportunity to change our community.”
This article appears in Oct 30 – Nov 12, 2019.