Former Antioch Police Chief Jim Hyde will represent Antioch’s Youth Intervention Network (YIN) at a conference of world peace experts at The Hague in the Netherlands on September 20, 2012. Hyde co-founded YIN with Antioch community leaders Keith and Iris Archuleta in 2007.

“This recognition of YIN by the U.N. during the opening celebration of the United Nations Peace University at The Hague is very exciting and such a great honor,” said co-founder Iris Archuleta.

Through their company, Emerald HPC International, the Archuletas have provided planning and development consulting to corporations, communities, and organizations in the U.S. and abroad using their “High Performing Communities” framework since 1992. The couple moved to Antioch to purchase a home in 1999, but soon began to be concerned about what was happening with the youth population and the lack of community collaboration around the issue.

Hyde said he was skeptical when he received an invitation from the United Nations mandated University of Peace (UPEACE) asking if he could make a presentation about the Antioch Youth Intervention Network at the UN conference. But the invitation was real.

Headquartered in Costa Rica, UPEACE has developed a variety of masters degree programs in peace building and conflict studies as well as shorter-term courses and training for students and professionals from around the world.

In January, UPEACE opened a new center at the Peace Palace at The Hague in the Netherlands. The center will be officially launched during a conference entitled “Peace for Humanity in the 21st Century.” With invitations limited to only 250 people globally, Hyde will be one of four presenters during the Urban Peace Workshop during the conference.

The YIN Approach

“Antioch was a good city that imploded on itself because it grew too fast,” Hyde said. “We started YIN in Antioch to help high-risk teenagers by first figuring out who was most likely to be at risk,” he said. “We asked ourselves, what could we do to change the behavior of youth who were acting out?”

So, unlike similar projects, the Antioch team used a small seed grant to do the research first. “There are so many projects out there without any research and very little science,” Hyde said. “We wanted the science in the front and then build strategies out of that.”

In cooperation with the school district, they collected anonymous electronic data on more than 8000 youth in Antioch. Data included grades, test scores, discipline, attendance and socio-economic status.

The research, conducted by Andy Wong of AJW, Inc., showed that the top two indicators of youth who are likely to commit or become victims of violence, without the appropriate interventions, are truancy and student disengagement, refuting the false notion that ethnicity and socio-economic status were the dominant indicators.

“The study showed that dysfunction with youth and within families had nothing to do with economics or race. Dysfunction is dysfunction wherever it is,” Hyde said.

“AJW, Inc. has done phenomenal work around the country,” Hyde said. “Wong’s analysis helped us develop a strategy which placed the focus on volunteerism, conflict mediation at the family level, and working with the family and school district to tailor an academic recovery plan.”

The data-driven strategy of YIN to reduce truancy and student disengagement has proven to be successful on many levels.

“The intent of YIN has been to change negative community messaging around the causes of problems related to youth and crime in Antioch; to work collaboratively with agencies and organizations to make necessary systemic changes in areas that impact youth and families, and to directly intervene in the lives of youth and families impacted by violent and/or anti-social behavior in the Antioch community,” said co-founder and Board President Keith Archuleta.

One of the reasons YIN has drawn so much attention is because it is a true collaborative, leveraging existing programs, breaking down silos, and cutting across traditional geographic lines. YIN convenes a collaborative of stakeholder organizations to develop and measure cross agency strategies to reduce truancy, dropout rates, and youth violence and to increase academic performance, graduation, employability, and college-going rates among youth.

A unique feature of YIN is that community volunteers are recruited and trained to serve as mediators and educational, legal, and family advocates who directly engage youth and families.

These volunteers participate in 40 consecutive hours of training as well as advanced professional development, and then invest 6 months to 3 years working directly with youth and their families with amazing results.

YIN uses Emerald HPC International’s High Performing Communities (HPC) framework for building effective and sustainable community collaboration.

Leaders and volunteers are also trained in the Dialogue for Peaceful Change (DPC) conflict management methodology developed by Different Tracks founders Colin Craig of Northern Ireland and Jaap van der Sar of the Netherlands, which teaches the practical skills that enable leaders to assist those in conflict to agree on how they can live and work without violence.

Hyde said the team learned early on that family participation in YIN had to be voluntary. “If families were forced they would have their ability to be a partner in the process taken away.”

The program takes in about 40 families a year and participation lasts at least a year and up to three years. The first step is conflict mediation.

The family meets weekly for 3 to 6 months with a volunteer mediation team of two. During the process, the family identifies issues of conflict within the home, identifies solutions, and enters into a partnership contract with the network to work towards solving the issues that are associated with YIN’s at risk indicators.

“Once they reach agreement the next step is to build and execute a recovery plan,” Hyde said. At that point the family is transitioned to a family/education advocate who helps them work with school and other identified agencies and resources to get the family working together, the young person back on track academically, out of anti-social behavior patterns and feeling like a valued member of the community.

Hyde said that most kids going into the program were on the brink of falling into serious dysfunction. “They weren’t coming home after school, they smelled of alcohol and marijuana, they were defiant, money was missing from the house,” he said. “The vast majority of the kids we worked with were on the fringe.”

The individualized approach of the YIN process allows for a variety of agencies and organizations to provide wrap-around services as needed, creating restorative outcomes for youth ages 10-18 and their families. The project collects detailed data from its participants to assess their progress and evaluate the success of the initiative.

In the summer of 2008, YIN served its first pilot family. Since that time, YIN has successfully trained 300 youth and adult leaders and volunteers, served over 50 families and 90 youth, and brought together more than 35 Antioch and Contra Costa County agencies and organizations.

Among youth and families served, there has been a 92% reduction in police calls for service, an 83% reduction in truancy, and an improvement in student GPA by an average of 2 grade points. Ninety percent of the students participating in YIN have graduated from high school. Of these, 100% have gone on to postsecondary education.

“We saw kids leave gangs and become academic achievers,” Hyde said.

YIN has helped to redefine the community message; improve and hold accountable the systems that impact youth and families; and engage youth and families in a way that has fundamentally changed their lives and decreased or eliminated the likelihood that these youth will continue to commit or become victims of violence.

YIN has received several local, state and national awards, and in 2010 the US Department of Justice awarded Antioch the sole Best Community Involvement award. Hyde said the award is usually spread around and given to up to five cities annually.

Although Hyde retired from the Antioch Police Department in January 2011, the Youth Intervention Network is going strong. It has been a goal since the inception of YIN to integrate its best practices into the right community vehicle that would move the vision forward and take it to a level of sustainability. To that end, a transition team was formed in December 2011. By May 17, 2012 the transition team had completed the incorporation of YIN as an independent 501c3, and selected a board of directors and officers.

Current Antioch police chief Alan Cantando is now Chair of the YIN collaborative and serves on the YIN Board. The community is building upon the legacy and success of the initiative by continuing to provide direct intervention services to the highest risk youth and their families and developing the leadership capacity of local youth through work with YIN partners such as the Police Activities League and the Youth Directors Council leadership program and through Peer Mediation training.

Key partners have included the Antioch Police Department, the City of Antioch, Supervisor Federal Glover’s Office, Antioch Unified School District, Sutter Delta Memorial Hospital, John Muir Health, East County Business-Education Alliance, the John F. Kennedy University Counseling Center, Children and Family Services, County Juvenile Probation, County Mental Health, Families Thrive, Contra Costa County Zero Tolerance Initiative, Kaiser Permanente, gang intervention groups such as One Day at a Time (ODAT) and The Williams Group (TWG); Antioch Police Activities League (PAL); and faith-based organizations, such as Antioch Christian Center, St. John’s Lutheran Church, and the Islamic Center of the East Bay; youth, parents, and more than 300 trained community volunteers and agency affiliates.

YIN has been supported financially through the A Taste of Antioch event in 2009, by individual donors, and by local and major funders such as: California Wellness Foundation, Keller Canyon Fund, East Bay Community Foundation, Vesper Society, Beswick Family Fund, Touchstone Golf Foundation, California Emergency Management Agency – Project Safe Neighborhoods Grant, Calpine Corporation, Pacific Gas and Electric Company, ABC/EV Floors, Dow Credit Union, East County Insurance, Delta Realtor Association, State Farm, Dow Chemical Company, John Muir Health, St. John’s Lutheran Church, First Congregational Church, Community Presbyterian Church, Sher & Minnard, AJW, Inc., Hymark Consulting, and Emerald Consulting.

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