Targeted Outreach - Governor's Office of Crime Control & Prevention ...

Who Did the Clubs Reach and How? 11
needs than do typical Club members. It also assures
that the culture of the Club does not change too rapidly
with the influx of youth who may have more
street ways than other Club members. Furthermore,
Table 2 reveals that recruitment during the school
year (September through June) proved more effective
than did summer recruiting.
Club staff recorded recruitment methods on the
youth’s intake form. Table 3 (Recruitment Source of
Target Youth) reveals that direct outreach—in which
Club staff talked directly to appropriate youth and
convinced them to come to the Boys & Girls Clubs—
was the single most productive approach in both
GPTTO and GITTO programs. About one-third of
prevention youth and 37 percent of intervention
youth were recruited this way.
Other GPTTO and GITTO youth came through
referrals from parents, police, schools and probation.
Following direct outreach, parent/relative
referral was the second most popular way that target
youth made it to the Clubs. Parents or other family
members referred 27 percent of prevention and 17
percent of intervention youth. School referrals were
also a popular mechanism to bring target youth into
the Clubs, with 18 percent of prevention and 17 percent
of intervention youth coming through school
referrals. Police and probation officers referred 4
percent of prevention and 15 percent of intervention
target youth.
It is important to remember that this overall snapshot
of the models’ recruitment strategies masks individual
differences among Clubs. Some recruited
many of their target youth from probation, whereas
others used mainly direct outreach and parent referral.
As we will see in Chapter V, effective strategies
differed from Club to Club.
Did the Clubs Reach the Right Youth?
Previous research has shown that many factors predict
gang membership among youth: neighborhood
characteristics, such as living in a gang-infested
neighborhood or social disorganization, including
poverty and residential mobility; family characteristics,
such as family members being in a gang, family
stress and disorganization; school factors, such as academic
failure, low educational aspirations and low
commitment to school; negative peers and a low
commitment to positive peers; and individual characteristics,
such as low socio-economic status, not identifying
with conventional adults or social institutions,
delinquency, alcohol and drug use, and gun possession
(Howell, 1998; Curry and Spergel, 1992;
Esbensen and Huizinga, 1993; Esbensen et al., 1993;
Hill et al., 1999; Curry and Spergel, 1988). Although
no one factor makes a gang member, as these risk
factors accumulate, youth become increasingly at risk
of gang involvement (Spergel, 1995) and other negative
outcomes (Furstenburg, 1993).
To weigh the accumulating negative effect of multiple
risk factors as we assessed whether the Clubs had
reached the youth they hoped to reach, we used a
Gang Risk Profile (see Figure 1) designed by Irving
Spergel to be useful for social service agencies’
recruitment, referral and service purposes. The profile
assigns a point value to a set of factors that have
been found to be associated with gang involvement.
Using data collected from surveys with the youth
when they entered the Boys & Girls Club, we calculated
a gang risk score for each of the GPTTO and
GITTO youth based on this profile.
These gang risk scores for target youth reveal that
Clubs implementing the GPTTO and GITTO
approaches were indeed successful in getting youth
at high risk for gang involvement into the Clubs.
Almost two-thirds (64%) of prevention and almost all
(94%) of intervention youth were at high risk
(scored seven points or more) of becoming gang
members. 7 But was the risk due to problems in one
or another particular area (e.g., family, peers or
school) or did target youth display a variety of factors
that placed them at risk of becoming gang members?
Below, we take a closer look at both the intervention
and prevention target youth to determine where the
greatest risk lies.
Individual Characteristics of Target Youth
Demographics
Nearly half (48%) of all prevention youth and 96
percent of intervention youth were teens (ages 13
years or older). Clubs recruited more males than
females for both initiatives: 64 percent of the prevention
youth were males and 74 percent of intervention
youth were males. (See Table 4, Demographic
Characteristics of Targeted Youth).