Phoenix House Beat Intro Voiceover 00:00 This is the Beat—a podcast series that keeps you in the know about the latest community policing topics facing our nation. Interview Tawana Waugh 00:08 This is Tawana Waugh with the COPS Office. With us today is Amy Singer, Senior Vice President for Public-Private Partnerships and Business Development at the Phoenix House Foundation. Amy is here to talk with us about the Phoenix House West Side Story project. Good afternoon Amy. Can you tell us a little bit about what the Phoenix House and the West Side Story project is? Amy Singer 00:33 Sure. Phoenix House is a non-profit drug treatment agency. We’re headquartered in New York, but we have programs in 11 states—about 120 programs altogether. We serve a wide range of individuals, adults and teenagers, family members. We have a number of specialty programs for veterans and mothers and children. We do a lot of work with at-risk kids in particularly, and have both residential and outpatient programs for kids—that’s most relevant to our conversation today. We work in a variety of school settings, juvenile justice settings, and so forth. Phoenix House has been around for close to 50 years. We were fortunate enough to receive funding for the West Side Story project, for the work we’re doing right now, back in the fall of 2011. We got started working in several different sites across the country. The West Side Story project is a really interesting collaboration between us and local law enforcement and theatre partners. What we do is we use a toolkit that was developed by somebody named Anna Laszlo. She is the genius who came up with the idea for the West Side Story project. We use this toolkit to foster communication between police and at-risk kids and the theatre partners about important issues like gang violence, racial concerns, police- teenager relationships, forbidden love. The material that’s embedded in West Side Story gives us the vehicle to promote these conversations in sites across the country. That’s what we’re doing. It’s just actually been incredibly rewarding, I think, for all of the participants. Everybody, I think, would say that their expectations were well exceeded, even those who were a little cynical about what might be involved. There’s been great enthusiasm. Some police officers who have a lot of experience have talked with great intensity about how moving it’s been for them to work closely with kids and hear their story and listen to them in different ways, made possible through this material that is, again, embedded in the West Side Story project. Tawana 03:10 Thank you Amy. How did the Phoenix House get involved in the West Side Story project? Amy 03:15 I first heard about it from a colleague and friend, Anna Laszlo. She came up with this idea in Seattle and tested it out with the Seattle Police Department and a theatre partner in that community. It went so well. She knew about my work at Phoenix House and asked whether we’d consider a pilot in Los Angeles doing similar work with the teenagers who reside in one of our residential treatment programs in L.A. We did that work in L.A. for a while with great success. We had a great partnership with a law enforcement partner. When a funding opportunity became available through the COPS Office, we applied and were lucky enough to be selected to extend this work to additional communities. We’re now actually running five West Side Story projects across the country. One is in Los Angeles, another in Arlington, Virginia; Dallas, Texas; New York City; and Orange County, California. Tawana 04:18 Can you share with us what the Phoenix House sites are doing with the West Side Story projects in their various locations? Amy 04:25 Sure. Well, I think it’s probably most important to say that each site is unique. The project was designed, and the toolkit that’s available for anyone who’s interested in doing this work, was really designed to be very flexible and organic, and to take into consideration the unique set of circumstances in an individual community and let the community really own the project and develop in ways that make sense given the size of the community, the kinds of problems that it faces, the structure of the police department, theatre resources, and so forth. Each project looks a little bit different. The heart of the project really involves getting together kids with police officers and a theatre partner and providing opportunities for interaction between kids and cops where they really have the opportunity to change their attitudes, get to know one another, talk with each other in safe settings, and really get over their negative attitudes and misperceptions that they may have had from the street and other interactions. They do this in a fun way, building on the lessons that are embedded in West Side Story from 50 years ago. Tawana 05:46 What do you think are some of the challenges that the sites faced when they were doing this project? Amy 05:51 Well, each site had to figure out how to connect with law enforcement. They were challenged with the question of whether you start at the top with the chief or someone in the senior department or whether you begin at more of a precinct level and try to get local buy-in. We really struggled with what the best way was to make inroads with the police department and start a positive dialogue. That was one challenge. We also, unique to Phoenix House, we do a lot of this work in our treatment programs. Some of our treatment programs have relatively short lengths of stays so we’ve had to adapt our work a little bit to deal with the fact that we see many, many kids and it’s quite different than projects where you’re working in the community, where you’re dealing with kids who are in high school and in the community and you have their attention for a full school year. We had to adapt in that way. Then we had to adapt and figure out who the right theatre partners would be in each community. We looked for theatre partners that weren’t necessarily theatres producing works on a big stage but theatre groups that really focused more on community outreach, exposing young people to theatre, open-mindedness about innovative projects. It took a while to find the right partner in each community. Tawana 07:28 That’s a perfect segue for my next question, which is, how do you find partners and resources for the West Side Story project? Amy 07:35 You sort of do it any way you can! We have been pretty tenacious. On the law enforcement side, we just kept knocking on doors and making phone calls until we found the right way in, in each community. We also used the great references we were able to get from our LAPD partner in other communities. Sometimes I think when people from one police department talk to those in another, that really helps. We had references from police departments who enjoy this work. On the theatre side, we were very lucky in New York. We worked with this theatre group called Possible Arts, a small non-profit theatre group here in the city. Its executive director, Tom Demenkoff, is a guy who was an actor for many, many years. He had a passion for working with individuals who find themselves in justice systems and treatment programs and so forth. He really believed in the power of theatre to transform lives. We met him and he became our partner here in New York. He helped us find our theatre partner in L.A. Anna Laszlo helped us find our theatre partner in Virginia. In the other communities, we knocked on doors until we found the group that seemed like the right match. It takes a little bit of tenacity and resourcefulness to find the right matches. It will take time. More than likely, if a community is trying to start up this project, they won’t get it right the first time. It’s all about continuing to try to build the best kinds of relationships and partnerships between non-profits, police, and theatre. Tawana 09:27 How do Phoenix House clients and law enforcement benefit from the project? Amy 09:31 I think the main benefit is a change in attitude, which really can follow people back into the community. We have kids who participate who see police officers in a very different way. Rather than seeing police officers as the ones who would hassle them and give them a difficult time and perhaps not treat them fairly, they see them as real people with families, with jobs to do to protect the community. For many, they’ve never had the opportunity to sit in a room and have fun with a police officer. The experience has always been quite negative. For our clients, it’s really eye-opening to experience members of law enforcement in a different way. I think for the law enforcement officers, a similar kind of transformation takes place. Some of the officers were a bit cynical about what would come out of this, what would the benefits be. I think they’ve found getting to know the kids very moving. They hear their stories, they learn a little bit more about their struggles with the community, their struggles with addiction, their struggles with challenging families, and so forth. They really begin to see the kids in a very different light. That’s really been one of the primary benefits. Tawana 10:50 What are the steps that an organization can take to implement the West Side Story project? Amy 10:56 I think the West Side Story project could be started either by a dynamic police department, by a theatre group that really wants to do more work with the community, or by a non-profit who has working with challenging kids as part of their mission. Any one of those three entities could start up a West Side Story project. I think what really is involved is persistence. The toolkit that Anna Laszlo created and the COPS Office makes available is a great, really helpful guide for any community. Any of those three entities with the toolkit could get this started and start to pull together individuals who might see this is a great way to prompt community dialogue about gang issues, police and kids, communications, and make it happen in a way that suits their community. Tawana 11:51 Well thank you so much for providing us with your expertise and your time. Amy 11:59 My pleasure. Thank you! Beat Exit Voiceover: 12:02 The Beat was brought to you by the United States Department of Justice COPS Office. The COPS Office helps to keep our nation’s communities safe by giving grants to law enforcement agencies, developing community policing publications, developing partnerships, and solving problems. Disclaimer: 12:18 The opinions contained herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position or polices of the U.S. Department of Justice. References to specific agencies, companies, products, or services should not be considered an endorsement by the authors or the U.S. Department of Justice. Rather, the references are illustrations to supplement discussion of the issues. ####END OF TRANSCRIPT####