Q+A: How Las Vegas leaders are allying to help black youths

By Ana Ley

Friday, March 6, 2015 | 2 a.m.

A year ago local officials launched a Las Vegas version of a White House initiative to help underprivileged boys and young men of color.

The project at West Preparatory Academy was loosely based on My Brother’s Keeper, President Barack Obama’s effort to bring community leaders and officials together to address achievement gaps and the disproportionate number of black men who are jobless or behind bars.

Aiming to expand the scope of its project to five area schools, the Las Vegas task force has since joined My Brother’s Keeper. It will release its first set of recommendations on Tuesday.

Task force member Tiffany Tyler, who serves as the chief operations officer for community development nonprofit Nevada Partners, spoke with the Sun this week to explain how the group is tackling such a big endeavor.

Edited excerpts:

How does this initiative work?

The program is composed of over 64 organizations locally that these boys and young men can find themselves coming in contact with. That can be the Department of Juvenile Justice Services, the Regional Housing Authority, Workforce Connections, Big Brothers Big Sisters. There’s a lot of overlap between these programs.

Right now, we’re at a place where we’re trying to coordinate and leverage existing resources and trying to analyze where people are falling through the gaps. It’s a cross-section effort that we haven’t seen in our community before.

For example, at one school we’re looking at we saw a number of youth on probation had gotten in trouble for shoplifting things like condoms and food. That tells us we might be seeing there’s a lack of basic needs the youth are trying to get, so we can bring in groups like Three Square and Planned Parenthood to help.

You’re using resources you already have.

How is the program expanding?

We started with West Preparatory Academy and we’ve added an additional four: Booker Elementary, Wendell P. Williams Elementary, H.P. Fitzgerald Elementary and Matt Kelly Elementary.

At this point, a lot of our funding just comes in the way of programming that we leverage. We ask partners to look at existing resources and have them come up with ways to help these men and boys. We have since been able to pool together more than $500,000 in programming and helped more than 16,000 people.

This year we’ll have a similar process but now the city is prioritizing this and we’re going to have grant processes. Now we’re part of My Brother's Keeper, which is a national initiative, and we have people at the table talking about the issue.

What kind of results have you seen so far, and what can we expect to see in Tuesday’s report?

One of the things we’re working on as a goal is to be able to share data across all agencies. We’re not necessarily at that place because of the way we have to handle confidentiality concerns. That’s one thing the Legislature is considering right now in Senate Bill 58 (which loosens restrictions for the release of information about children in juvenile court and protective custody).

Another thing we highlight is an example of something that is already happening at West Prep, where they’re offering support and counseling to students before sending them the discipline route. They designated a full-time employee there who mentors students.

It’s fundamental to give students wraparounds and support to avoid that school-to-prison pipeline.