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DC Youth Investment Trust trought the Effective Youth Development Initiative, has donate $30,000 to Alcanzando Metas Foundation to study the Girls Gang Reduction.
Violence among girl gangs has drawn increased attention in the past three years. Several incidents have forced the city and youth serving organizations to re-examine the supports and interventions provided to girls in the community. This work will identify and document best practice principles and approaches that best meet the violence prevention and holistic developmental needs of DC girls and how program design is based upon these principles.
Here is one of the girls Maria was a ninth grader looking for friends. She yearned from the kind of close relationships that she had been missing in her family life. Her father had been unfaithful to her mother, and the affair had cast a dark shadow on her family life. The father blamed the family problems on Maria. Maria felt an uncomfortable distance from both parents; she turned to a gang member for support and protection. What she did not have at home, she would soon find in her surrogate family: the gang. The petite ninth grader would soon find herself in a fight at school, out of loyalty to her new friend.
When Claudia joined the Alcanzando Metas after-school program in 2006, she had been struggling to separate herself from her former gang- her crew. Her cousin Angela had introduced her to gang life over three years before. Life with her crew was exciting and seductive, as she described it. The companionship with other Latinos, along with the partying and fighting, had given her a sense of belonging that she, the daughter of immigrants, had never felt. That all changed, however, one night when an aunt phoned her, sobbing over the phone; Claudia’s cousin Angela had been shot. As Angela lay dying in the hospital, she begged Claudia to quit the crew and turn her life around. On a promise made to her dying cousin, Claudia would soon transfer to Roosevelt High School, and soon get the support of Alcanzando Metas. With the foundation’s help, Claudia graduated from high school and entered the University of the District of Columbia.
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