Questions and Answers

2009 California Peace Prize Honorees

Brian King

Q: Why did you help start Fresno Street Saints?

A: Fresno Street Saints was started out of necessity. Several pastors and I were participating in an operation here in Fresno called “Bringing Back Broken Neighborhoods” run by the Fresno Police Department. One day several years ago, we came out of the police station and we ran into a young lady that we had known over the years. Her son was murdered in a double homicide. She asked if she could use our facility to hold the funeral and we said yes. During the funeral, they ran out of ice, so they sent their nephew to the store; and on the way back to the funeral, he was murdered. A couple of pastors and I were sitting there and said, “Man, we need to do something.” So we asked, “What if we committed ourselves to staying and working together in this city for 20 years?” We began by combining all of our small resources, including our churches and the change in our pockets. We identified the needs in our own community and began to fill them and build programs.

Q: When you think about what you experienced at age eight, do you believe youth today are experiencing the same kinds of pressures and options?

A: Youth today are facing bigger challenges than I did. Back then, we believed it was okay to fight and get whooped, you know? Today, everything is about who has the biggest gun. Kids and parents are not getting the training that can help them get past the crisis we face. One of the saddest things that I’ve read is that young men of color of this particular generation are not expected to outlive their parents. That’s the first time I’ve ever heard that about a generation. We have a program where we’re teaching young men silk-screening and one of the things we talked about is how many of their buddies have had T-shirts with pictures of people and “rest in peace” written on them. Everybody in the room said that they have been affected by that. I explained to them what the statistics were for them to live. And so we came up with a slogan: “live in peace.” We decided to put that slogan on T-shirts and get it out there.

Q: What role does the faith community play in some of the work that you do?

A: Collaboration is what we do. Our ideology about reaching and serving people is based on our faith. We work with all kids just like the gangs do; we don’t discriminate, we love them all. A lot of churches in the city support our work. They consider this a mission field right in their own backyard. We understand that it’s going to take physical, spiritual and mental deals to heal this community. The churches, the mayor’s office, business leaders, the schools – they’re all part of it. We're looking at how to bring all these pieces and their resources into one place. We’ve been successful in making those bridges and being that honest capacity broker who’s able to funnel these things right into the community.

Q: What do the Fresno Street Saints do for the youth in the community?

A: In the 1970s, they used to say, feed a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day. Then in the 1980s, it was if you teach a man how to fish, he’ll eat for a lifetime. What we have done is moved to answering the question: “Who owns the pond?” Outside efforts can’t give us a sense of ownership of our own community. We either own it or we don’t. What we’re doing is taking back these streets and directing resources right to the people, especially to the youth. These kids need opportunity; they need to see it right where they live. The community leaders and resources must be as visible and as accessible as the gangs are, or the gangs will continue to win. Our programs become the alternative to belonging to a gang. We are consistently in the community where the youth hang out; they can feel our hearts and know that they can trust us. We want them to feel safe. We want them to know that they can dream about living beyond their 21st birthday and that they don’t need to resort to a life in prison. We get them into programs and teach them how to be resilient, how to say “no” to what they don’t want in their life, and how to say “yes” to what gives them hope. We teach parents and their kids the skills that help them strengthen their families and become leaders in their community. Our goal is to partner and build this deal from the ground up, instead of looking for people from the outside to come in.

Phalen Lim

Q: How did you get involved in this work?

A: I have been involved with The Cambodian Family since I first arrived in the United States. I was looking for a place to belong, where I could connect with people who had similar experiences to mine. I started off as a client; I came for tutoring. Then I became a volunteer. I chaperoned kids on field trips and helped with anything that they needed. I just felt like this is where I belonged; this is where I could help. In the late 1980s and early ‘90s, there was a lot of violence in the neighborhood. Kids would relay stories to me, “Oh, there is a gang shooting. There are shots through my wall.” Parents are nervous and scared when that happens. The Cambodian Family is a great place for kids to come and feel safe. I think it’s great that agencies such as Cambodian Family collaborate with other agencies to work in resolving the violence. Even though I now live in another city, I always come back to the neighborhood because this is where I am most comfortable.

Q: Do you think there is some correlation to the trauma and violence in Cambodia and the violence you now see in your community?

A: I think what happened in Cambodia — the killing fields and the genocide — affects everybody who has gone through it. That includes children, parents and grandparents arriving in the United States. That trauma is always there until you deal with it personally. Because they arrived pretty recently, they have not yet had a chance to really process and talk about what they have gone through. They keep it to themselves. The parents and the kids are not willing to communicate about it with each other. So one way that the kids know how to communicate is through violence that they observed coming from Cambodia, not just during the genocide, but also from the journey to the Thailand camp. Violence is the only way of life that they’ve known.

Another reason I believe youth form gangs is that they want to feel a sense of belonging. When they come here, not many people know much about what’s going on with us. Kids would ask us, “What ethnicity are you?” And we'd say: “We're Cambodian.” The kids don’t know what Cambodian is. I remember personally feeling hurt because people don't know who I am and where I’m coming from. The way I handled this was to just to keep to myself. But young people who join gangs are unable to do that.

Q: Can you talk about the role of The Cambodian Family in reaching out to other communities?

A: I think what’s so great about The Cambodian Family is that we never turn a client down based on their ethnicity, race, income or wherever they’re coming from. We somehow learn and educate ourselves to adapt to the client’s need. In the last couple of years, we’ve been getting a lot of Latino children in our programs.

It’s not difficult for me at all to serve our Latino students because, the way I look at it, Cambodians and Latinos have more in common than differences. I look at each child and each parent as a human being and that helps me to look beyond their exterior. I just look at what they need; how can I better help them?

Q: Can you tell me some of the outcomes that your organization has had? Do more kids graduate from high school? Do they go to college?

A: One of the advantages of our youth program is that we've been in existence since 1991. So we’re able to track the kids all the way through to their having a career. Our first group to graduate from high school was in 1997. That was our celebration, our success. In 1996, our graduation rate for Cambodian students was at 50 percent; now we are somewhere between 95 percent and 100 percent. One of our former students is now a doctor and another is a financial manager.

Some are willing to come back to The Cambodian Family if we need their help. For our youth program, what I like the most is to reach out to those who have become successful and ask them to come back and tell their story. I believe the kids can identify with people who have lived in the neighborhood, have gone through similar struggles and made it. I am a very strong believer in leading by example.

Olis Simmons

Q: Tell me about what you see in your community and in the youth that you serve – what’s the state of violence affecting this community?

A: I think we’ve hit an all-time low in some ways. When you look at East Oakland, in particular, we had a BART officer basically slaughter an unarmed man at the beginning of the year. And then three months later, we had a young parolee shoot and kill four police officers. To have that kind of violence visited upon a community like East Oakland, where the economy has really bottomed out, is a disaster. Yes, we have done a lot of good work, which keeps us from the levels of violent crime we had in the early 1980s, but I think it is clear that there is a lot more work to be done.

There was a lot of public outpouring of love when the four officers were murdered. The loss was tragic, no question about it. Here are people who have devoted themselves to protect and serve and came to work, never to go home again. But every life is precious and when young people don’t see that outpouring for them, it really reinforces the message that their life somehow is not as important. We think, “Oh, it's just another young person.” But the truth is that every life is precious and until we make that clear we are condoning their deaths.

Q: What challenges do youth in East Oakland face?

A: Young people in East Oakland are facing a myriad of challenges. Chief among them is the failure, quite frankly, of all of the adults in public systems around them to properly support them. Young people need to experiment to figure out who they are in the world and test the boundaries and take risks. Yet for some young people — especially those living in neighborhoods where guns and drugs are readily available and mainstream employment, structured activities and caring positive adults are unavailable — the risks they will take can cost them their lives. We have allowed an environment where almost every young person I know knows five or more young people who have fallen to homicide. And that state of affairs is just unacceptable.

Q: What keeps you going?

A: The thing that gets me up in the morning, that keeps me committed to the work, is the realization that no one is coming to save us. This is our work! This work is something that you have to feel personally connected to and personally responsible for. I don’t approach the work as a missionary, like I’m coming to help someone else. I actually see myself very much in the lives of the young people. Someone helped me and created a pathway. Those of us who have had that experience have an obligation to return the favor. What excites me the most is the possibility that we have everything that we need at the ready. Now we need to come together to organize and leverage our resources.

Q: What would you want to say to a policymaker with some clout?

A: The one message that I would give is that prevention is more than just physical health. Prevention is often investing in young people, in their education and in their sense of possibility, because that ultimately saves us money and builds a workforce that’s able to compete in the global economy. Be expansive in your notion of prevention. It’s not simply preventing a physical disease or injury; it’s preventing the loss of hope. Loss of hope will cost us more in the long-run than a person being treated for diabetes.