Anti-Gang Initiative to Distribute Seed Money to Grass Roots Orgs

By Alison St John / Reporter, KPBS Public Broadcasting

Published March 15, 2007 at 12:04 PM PDT

This story was published more than 17 years ago.

The city of San Diego will experiment with a new anti-gang initiative. The city's Gang Commission and the San Diego Foundation will give out seed money, designed to help existing grass roots efforts g

The city of San Diego will experiment with a new anti-gang initiative. The city's Gang Commission and the San Diego Foundation will give out seed money, designed to help existing grass roots efforts grow. KPBS reporter Alison St John has more.

Gang-related violence is on the increase in San Diego. The amount of money in the new ‘STOP Gang Violence Now’ Initiative is not much -- $150,000. But the idea is to give small grants of up to $25,000 each to groups already working on the streets -- fast, within the next 30 to 90 days.

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Travis Stocking is an OG, an Old Gangster, whose group "Overcoming Gangs" will apply for one of the grants.

Stocking : There's a way to get this rolling the right way. The will is already rolling but we can speed things up with a little bit of money. We been doing it with no money at all -- can you imagine with just a little money some of the things that we can get done.

Stocking says his group tries to get gang members back into school or into jobs. He says small things make a difference -- like fixing a van to takes teens out of the neighborhood, to show them a different world outside. Alison St John, KPBS news.

Alison St John

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Alison St John currently serves as a general assignment reporter and occasionally co-hosts KPBS Midday Edition. She fell in love with KPBS Radio when she arrived in San Diego in 1985 and first heard NPR. She has been a voice on KPBS Radio since 1989, and has served as a news reporter for radio, TV and the web, as well as anchoring, hosting, producing and editing. Alison has reported on stories about North County and was based in the KPBS' North County Bureau. Alison covered the metro beat during the critical period of the San Diego City pension crisis, and the education beat while Alan Bersin was the controversial Superintendent of San Diego City School District. She covered health when the industry was converting to managed care and told welfare reform stories in the late 1990s when Clinton was “ending welfare as we know it.” She has covered land use issues extensively, looking at the challenges of meeting a growing population while preserving community character, and developing a better transportation system to meet environmental concerns. She has done many stories on the military in San Diego, and the series she edited on the challenges veterans face returning from active duty to civilian life won “Best of Show” from the San Diego Society of Professional Journalists. She occasionally hosts the KPBS Roundtable and KPBS Midday Edition. Alison has won awards from the San Diego Press Club, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Associated Press TV and Radio Association, and the California Golden Mike Awards. Alison was born in Tanzania, brought up in Scotland, and earned her degree in psychology and sociology from Durham University in England. Her postgraduate diploma is in student counseling. She worked in England, Nigeria, Switzerland, Belgium, India, and Japan before moving to the United States in 1981. She now lives in Oceanside and enjoys how her community is growing and changing.