On the first day of class, gunshots alarmingly rang out in the hallway of the Professional Community Intervention Training Institute (PCITI) in Los Angeles, where former gang members sit alongside grad students working toward their doctorates in psychology from the Chicago School of Professional Psychology.
Executive director Aquil Basheer soon arrived to tell the students that he had fired harmless blanks as an experiential learning technique to get the students to pay attention to their own reactions and those of others in the face of violence.
Why the seemingly extreme teaching method? It’s a way to make violence prevention lessons more authentic and more helpful in case the soon-to-be-doctors some day find themselves in truly dangerous situations.
Basheer knows what he’s talking about. After all, he was once a gang member himself. After leaving the criminal lifestyle behind, he began PCITI in 2002 to give firefighters, psychologists, and other professionals standard techniques to apply toward violence intervention. In the past, the people who live in violent neighborhoods usually wouldn’t talk to the psychologists who tried to launch violence prevention programs — but they’ll talk to Basheer.
Former gang members come to his classes to talk about what situations spark violence and the best ways to diffuse tensions. They teach the doctorate students how to control rumors, restrain people safely, hold candlelight vigils for victims of violence without prompting more shootings, help bystanders, and perform CPR.
The former gang member instructors even teach the students what body language is acceptable in poor communities. Nikko Deloney, one of the streetwise teachers, told Melissa Pandika of Ozy Magazine, “You need to know if you have a holier-than-thou look in a place where people are hopeless.”
Once the program participants have a basic understanding about how to intervene in or prevent violent situations, the teachers take them out on the streets of Los Angeles for tours of “hotspots.”
Deloney says one of the most important lessons is to observe and listen more than they preach. “We call it grandstanding for no one. ‘I have all the answers in my book.’ If you show up without your book and a little communication and integrity … you can actually help somebody.”
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Tag: Low-Income Neighborhoods
These Girls Had Little Chance of Becoming Scientists, Until They Connected With an Innovator Who’s Improving Their Odds
Latina girls are the least likely of any group to indicate that they’re interested in pursuing a career in the STEM fields, according to a Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities report. While Latina women comprise eight percent of the U.S. population, they make up just two percent of scientists and engineers.
Luckily, engineer Luz Rivas is aiming to change that with her DIY Girls after school program in her home neighborhood of Pacoima in Los Angeles.
Rivas grew up poor in L.A. with her sister and single mother, often sleeping in other people’s garages because they had no permanent home of their own. In fifth grade, Rivas used a computer at school and immediately fell in love. “I felt like I had a real skill. I always liked things that had a real answer,” she told Erica L Sánchez of NBC News. From then on, she took every science class she could and applied to MIT just to see if she could get in. She did. After overcoming initial fears about leaving L.A., she went to MIT, even though “It felt like it was another country,” she told Sánchez. “I had never met so many students who had parents who were college-educated. It was shocking to see kids whose parents were guiding them. I didn’t have that.”
Now Rivas is stepping in to guide other girls who don’t have role models in STEM fields. After grad school and various engineering jobs, Rivas moved back to Los Angeles in 2013 to start DIY Girls. Most of the fifth grade girls in the DIY Girls after school program are Latina and qualify for free or reduced lunch. Rivas teaches them how to use 3D printers, write computer code, make wearable electronics, build toys, and more.
According to its website, DIY Girls aims to provide “a continuous pathway of support to a technical career” for these girls all the way through high school. Rivas works to develop the girls’ confidence, so that they keep raising their hands and asking questions right on through middle school, when many girls clam up due to peer pressure. DIY Girls expanded its program to a second public school this year.
DIY Girls gets moms involved too, with meetups for women who want to learn technical skills including coding, woodworking, and electronics. Rivas said that many of the girls’ parents work in construction, and become interested in what their daughters are learning. “People in our community are not engineers, but they know how to make things. They know how to make everything,” she told Sánchez. And soon there will be a new generation of women in this neighborhood who can make anything they want to, as well.
MORE: What Has Two Pom-Poms, a Ph.D., and a Passion for Science?
Here’s How an Ancient Banking Technique Can Help America’s Poor
Have you ever heard of a money pool? Until now, we hadn’t either.
A money pool is a technique that people worldwide living in poverty (or close to it) have used for centuries to save for large expenses. Here’s the way it works: Each member of the pool contributes the same amount of cash each month. Then, they each take turns receiving the lump sum.
Francisco Cervera, a resident of Phoenix, saw the effectiveness of a money pool when funds were tight and he needed a computer for school. His mother saved for it by contributing to a money pool in San Diego that she ran (she was responsible for not only reminding people to pay, but collecting their contributions, too).
While money pools are a good idea since they provide access to savings for people who can’t use banks, Cervera thought they could be improved. So as an adult, he started eMoneyPool with his brother Luis. The online tool formalizes the money pool and provides guarantees for participants in case anyone misses a payment.
New users to eMoneyPool are limited to $100 contributions, and each savings group consists of five participants. The website verifies users’ identities, and even works to establish a credit history for them through their transactions — helping them work towards being able to use a more traditional financial institution in the future. “We are creating a bridge for our users to lending institutions, but we are doing it in a way that is comfortable and familiar to them, with money pools,” said Cervera told Pop! Tech.
“Saving money by yourself is a nice idea. But when you are living at the poverty level, everything is drawing on your cash,” said Cervera. “Money pools change the idea of saving because you are saving as a team…It changes the desire to save from a want to a need. People think, ‘Now I have to put that money away because the group is counting on me.'”
MORE:Seattle Readies ‘Financial Empowerment Centers’ for Low-Income Residents