"It’s all about relationships"

Forks stood still and faces gazed in rapt attention last Friday, when Bob Flores, former gang member and facilitator of the Gang Prevention in Sonoma Valley program, gave some straight talk to the Chamber of Commerce’s State of the Valley breakfast about gangs and drugs.
“I was kicked out of school for starting a fire on the roof,” he said, smiling sheepishly. “It was one of the many times I’d been in trouble and I thought it was the end. But when I was told to see the superintendent, he gave me a choice.” The superintendent, whom he did not name, asked if he wanted to stay in school, and Flores suddenly realized that, yes, actually, he did. He said so, and the superintendent, amazingly enough, gave him another chance. That trust, he told the audience of successful Sonoma business and civic leaders, made all the difference. Flores came back into school, applied himself, and when at graduation, he went up to get his diploma, that same superintendent looked him in the eye and said, ”I knew you could do it.” That relationship put him on the right path for life.
Flores said that whether they know it or not, kids, even gang members, want to be part of the community, and to do that they need relationships. He said, “We need to welcome gang members into the community.” The problem is how to do it. Kids might want real jobs, but they have no job skills, no interviewing skills, no idea how to dress for a job or conduct themselves in a job, much less carry out the tasks of the job. “They don’t know how to get from A to B,” he said. “I’m asking that we,” he looked around the room, “become their mentors, that we teach them.” He must have imagined the questions that immediately leapt to people’s minds. “Let them know where you’ve come from,” he said. “Show them how you got to where you are now.” He mentioned job shadowing as one way.
The consequences are dire, he reminded the group, if this isn’t done. “We’re talking about a few that have the capability of doing quite a lot of damage,” he said, “quite a lot of damage.” And if there were any doubt about the role drugs play in the whole gang scenario, he emphasized what Valerie Brown had suggested earlier: “You can have drugs alone, and you can have drugs and gangs, but you can’t have gangs without drugs.”