OXNARD : Group Takes Aim at Social Problems

An Oxnard-based group will be seeking more jobs and more private programs to ease poverty, unemployment and the impact of gang violence among the city’s youth, officials said this week.

The initiatives, outlined by the Oxnard Youth Action Committee, were announced Wednesday during a meeting of about 50 leaders from Oxnard businesses, schools and government agencies.

“The problems (facing youth) are simply out of control,” said Ventura County Supervisor John Flynn, who organized the group a year ago to discuss how crime and poverty affect the city’s young people.

Flynn said members of the committee will be going to youth recreation centers, city and county government agencies and churches to lobby for jobs and programs for the city’s teen-agers.

“A job means a lot to a kid who doesn’t have money,” Flynn said. “Our purpose is to impact the institutions that are really there to serve the youth: the churches, the Boys & Girls Club . . . to enlist their assistance and generate a spirit of reaching out to youth.”

At the meeting Wednesday, committee members broke into groups to develop such goals as getting more youths involved in directing the organization’s activities.

“We felt very strongly that we need to get to the grass roots of the problems,” said committee member Shirley Ortiz, division director at the Center for Employment Training in Oxnard. “We need to get the youths and their families involved,” Ortiz said. “We wanted to make sure that the parents and the students themselves get what they feel they’re lacking.”

Salvador Paniagua, 17, the only youth at Wednesday’s meeting, also said he hoped to see more teen-agers involved.

“I feel that once you bring in teen-agers you get a lot more variables, a lot more points of view,” said Paniagua, who is student body president at Channel Islands High School. The committee has developed a “blueprint for change” that focuses on four areas--the family, prevention-intervention, education and employment. Committee members said targeting these areas will best alleviate the problems facing the city’s children.

The committee will meet again Feb. 19.