Olympic Funds Panel Halts Grants to L.A. Gang Services Agency

The foundation that allocates Olympic surplus funds for youth sports announced $2.8 million in new grants Thursday and disclosed that it is not renewing its largest grant specifically directed at assisting programs to stem gang activity.

The outgoing president of the Amateur Athletic Foundation of Los Angeles, Stanton Wheeler, said the $349,990 grant given in late 1985 to the Community Youth Gang Services agency, whose activities are centered in South-Central and East Los Angeles, had not worked out as well as hoped.

Under the grant, the gang services agency was to establish sports programs for gang members and for youngsters susceptible to becoming gang members.

Wheeler said the foundation had discovered that the agency “has a lot of expertise in a lot of areas, but sport was not a primary one.” He said the agency lacks trained personnel in sports programs.

He and the newly appointed foundation president, Anita DeFrantz, said that the foundation is continuing to fund a number of other programs that may serve to dissuade would-be gang members in the inner city. These include, this summer and fall, special programs in swimming, soccer and volleyball.

‘We’ll Keep Trying’

“It’s very tough,” DeFrantz said. “There’s this belief that sport can do everything. It can’t. But we’ll keep trying.”

Steve Valdivia, gang services agency executive director, said: “I don’t think it was a matter of experience. I know it wasn’t. There were some mitigating factors.”

He blamed the failure of the grant to bear fruit on problems at what turned out to be its principal site, Cleland House in East Los Angeles, which closed recently after a series of what he described as “leadership and staffing” problems.

“We had nothing but grief from the time we went in there,” Valdivia said. “There was no electricity. The staff was in chaos. We’d go there with a bunch of kids and we couldn’t get in the doors.”

Valdivia said he believes that if Cleland House were to reopen, his agency’s sports program could be revived.

Steve Montiel, the foundation vice president assigned to monitor the gang services agency grant, said it had become apparent even before the Cleland House problems that the activities envisioned when the grant was made had to be refocused.

“From our perspective, there’s a difference we see in agencies that are not used to dealing with sport,” he said. “(The agency) was experienced in gang prevention.”

14 Clubs Planned

Originally, Montiel said, the agency proposed establishing 14 sports clubs. On the foundation’s suggestion, this number was first pared to six and then to three. When problems were encountered in organizing three, he said, it was decided to establish one program based at Cleland House and use it as a model.

“We were starting from scratch with an agency that had not been engaged in sport programming before,” Montiel said.

He said the foundation has decided, instead, to concentrate on “a large number of high-quality sports programs” that are being run by such established sports agencies as the American Youth Soccer Organization, YMCAs, Boys Clubs and the Los Angeles city and county recreation and parks departments in the same areas as gang services agency operations.

The largest grant announced Thursday by the foundation was a conditional one of $1.3 million to the Los Angeles city Department of Recreation and Parks for development over a three-year period of three centers providing sports and recreational opportunities for the disabled.

Under the plan, $124,000 will be used for renovations and equipments at Chatsworth Park South in the San Fernando Valley. Release of the rest of the money for development of centers at the Elysian Park Recreation Center and the planned Martin Luther King Recreation Center in the inner city will be contingent on the success of the program at Chatsworth Park South.

In addition, the foundation announced a $100,000 grant for staffing and equipment for a sports program for disabled youth operated by Casa Colina Inc. in Pomona and a $175,000 program for a series of videos to teach coaches how to work with hearing-impaired youth.

There were 27 other grants and five new programs announced, totaling about $1.2 million.

Meanwhile, the foundation announced a July 28 ground breaking for its $3-million Paul Ziffren Sport Resource Center at its headquarters at 2131 W. Adams Blvd. in South-Central Los Angeles. The center is expected to be open for conferences, research and gatherings of youth and sports figures by June, 1988.