| Why bad kids can go good... When he first became the liaison for the Asian community in Oakland, Police Officer Robert Sayaphupha noticed that little was being done to focus on youth in the Chinatown area. Membership in gangs was rising, as well as the violence that went along with it. In 1990 he founded the Asian Youth Services Committee to reach out to Asian teens in trouble, allowing them to get involved in activities and to gain some leadership experience in the process. The experiment failed. Within months the club's first vice-president had been arrested for committing a drive-by shooting and another of the club's members had committed an armed robbery. "Our goal was to reach out to 'At-Risk' youth, but we didn't really define what that was," says Sayaphupha. "We thought that 'At risk' would buy youth already in trouble, youth that was on probation or youth that had been in jail. So we were targeting towards those youth. The results were not very good." Though discouraged, Sayaphupha tried another approach. He recruited heavily in all the Oakland high schools. He wanted those kids that already had some leadership experience, kids who were a little more responsible. The new group would be for everyone, Sayaphupha reasoned, since in one way or another all kids are 'At-Risk.' "Our goal and purpose was to identify the needs in the Asian community. We wanted to use the youth themselves to help the other youth,” Sayaphupha said. "The youth helping each other worked much better than us helping them." Today, the AYSC continues to give Oakland's young Asians an opportunity to participate in the club's social functions like dances and basketball tournaments and community service projects including "Clean Up the Park days," and food and clothing drives. The club also sponsors a Lion Dance team which regularly performs at competitions and at Chinatown functions. It also sponsors an annual essay contest that allows competing student a chance to voice their views on the challenges facing Oakland's Asian community. "For high school students, this year's topic was diversity," he adds. "What are some of the problems that you see in this diverse community and what can we do to solve some of the problems that go along with it." So far, Sayaphupha's experiment seems to have paid off. The mixture of pairing the honor students with troubled students has taken hold and the club can boast that 90 percent of its members go to college. It has also helped to spawn similar clubs, also run through the Oakland Police Department, aimed at both Latino and African American young people. |
The AYSC Lion Dance team performs at this year's Chinese New Year celebration.
Oakland Police Officer Robert Sayaphupha began the AYSC in 1990.
Lion dancers perform for Oakland Chinatown merchants. Photos provided by AYSC |
