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Lateefah Simon is executive director of San Francisco's Center for Young Women's Development, a peer-run organization dedicated to helping troubled girls and young women. Employees from the center are represented on the city's Juvenile Justice Commission and on various work groups of San Francisco's Juvenile Detention Alternative Initiative. Young women from the center have also spoken on the United Nations floor about civil rights abuses that girls face in the juvenile justice system. Simon, 24, has been employed at the center for eight years and was recently granted a Ford Foundation fellowship in the highly competitive Leadership for a Changing World program. |
Simon on building leadership among girl offenders:
"Everyone on our staff is 25 and under. Young women are recruited, hired and trained to work as community organizers, and we recruit these young women from the Youth Guidance Center [San Francisco's juvenile hall] and from the streets. The young women design our programs, implement them and do most of the evaluation. Our philosophy is that young women who are from the streets and from juvenile hall and the justice system should lead and develop solutions for their own communities, and that means learning how to write, use a computer, speak in public and organize in the community.
"We hire once a year and start people off at $10 an hour, with health insurance. We work out housing and day care for the young women, pay for day care and for the first and last months’ rent if the young women are homeless. A lot of the girls who are here, we agree we've pumped a lot of poison into our communities, and so this is an opportunity to not just give back but to create some systemic change. And we are doing that by providing people with jobs and opportunities for young women to push other young women to start critically thinking about their life experience, from prostitution to pushing dope. The sad part of it is that every time we hire, we get 80 to 100 applications, and we only have money to employ 15, 16 girls a year.
"This generation of young women we are working with are survivors. So many different things and people have tried to victimize them -- and have. The stuff comes out here, every day. We'll be in a staff meeting and someone will just break down in tears. Somebody will talk about how they didn't have control over having sex for the first time, or the first time they had to sell crack, or the first time they had to prostitute for a place to stay that night, or the first time they had to spend a night in jail. We don't give up on people -- and part of the work here is about believing that people deserve chances.
"We've had to work three times as hard to get that $5,000 grant, or that $10,000 grant or city contract. That's meant 15-, 16-hour days sometimes, and learning everything from grant writing to bookkeeping to supervision and recreating a mission. And that's meant reading stuff that we didn't understand and then rereading it again and again. We don't want to be looked at as little girls running an organization. There's never been a time when we haven't paid people; there's never been a time where we've had to close the doors; and there's never been a time when we couldn't give employees housing money if they needed it. Those to me are the real successes -- the fact that the door is always open and that girls have a beacon where they are pushed, not judged."
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