In an effort to keep the city’s teens off the streets and out of gangs, the prosecutors’ office and Boys & Girls Club have started a new program using a recently awarded grant.

Project Outreach will be modeled after a national Boys & Girls Club program, said Donna Nash, grants administrator at Lynchburg’s Commonwealth’s Attorney’s office.

Through the youth community court program, teens who otherwise would have gone through courts and come out on the other end with criminal records are ordered to participate in community programs geared toward turning their lives around.

“A lot of these kids we were seeing in our youth community court program, a lot of them had risk factors or indicated to use they were involved in gangs or risky behavior,” she said.

Most of those kids are already being sent to the Boys & Girls Club of Greater Lynchburg. With a new-projects grant available through the Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services, she and local Boys & Girls Club Executive Director Mark Sheehan applied with the idea of bringing in a new staffer dedicated to keeping kids away from gangs.

When the prosecutors’ office won the $62,475 grant, the club hired Aaron Smith as a case manager.

Smith, a Lynchburg College graduate and former assistant basketball coach, said he hopes to get 40 kids into the program. Finding them won’t be a problem — be it through the community court program, police, schools or in the neighborhoods the club serves — he said. Retaining them could be, he said.

“It’s about developing those relationships with those individuals so we can keep them there and keep them on the right track,” he said.

Smith’s goal is for all participants to graduate high school.

Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Kelly Osterbind said she also hopes Smith’s involvement in the community court program will make it more successful.

“His consistent contact and mentoring throughout the process is important,” Osterbind said.

Smith and Sheehan said club programs based on participants’ interests such as basketball leagues or dances are useful, but can be limited in their long-term effectiveness.

Sheehan said being successful means creating programs that fulfill the needs that might otherwise be met by gang membership or other criminal activity.

“The biggest need that a gang fills is just to be wanted,” he said. “Can we offer that? Yes. But kids selling drugs on the street corner? How do you break that cycle of excitement? Not only are you making a little money, you’re also being accepted by a peer group.
“You have to get the kid to start thinking internally about changing.”

For Project Outreach to be successful, Sheehan said, a coalition of community service groups will have to band together to try to cure other ills that may lead a kid toward risky behavior. Through his interactions with teens in the program, Smith may learn that there are problems in the home that the Boys & Girls Club isn’t capable of addressing, he said. Or there may be problems at school, such as truancy, that the club doesn’t find out about until it’s too late.

“We’ll have to find partners through social services and other organizations,” he said. “We’re not the panacea. We’re not going to fix every kid. There are no silver bullets.”

Stakeholders are scheduled to meet this afternoon to learn more about the new program and to form a steering committee, Nash said.

To learn more about the program, call Nash at (434) 455-3770. For more about volunteer opportunities, Sheehan and Smith can be reached at 846-1111.