Parks After Dark

About the Program

Category: Parks and Recreation (Best in Category)

Year: 2011

The Florence-firestone region of Los Angeles County has an immense youth population; roughly 364,488 children and adolescents between the ages of 10 and 17 reside in the area. With such a vast number of young people residing in such a relatively small district, one of the county’s chief responsibilities becomes ensuring that there are positive programs and services available to aid in the development, academic success, and decision making skills of these teenagers. The Parks After Dark (PAD) program was designed as a component of the Los Angeles County’s Gang Prevention Initiative to increase the use of parks as a social and community resource. The program sought to integrate enhanced community recreation, intergroup community building, neighborhood civic education and engagement, a community violence intervention/prevention program, and other human services into one full-bodied package. The program lasted nine weeks, and offered courses several nights a week at many of the parks in the area; it engaged young people and their families and incorporated groups of varying ethnicities and cultures. The results were overwhelmingly positive. The potential pool for gang recruitment shrank, and older gang members were respectful of the “safe space” at the parks, which protected their siblings, children, and other family members. Further, there was a minimal number of gang-related crimes in and around the parks while the program ran, and the overall rate of crime for the areas that the parks are located in decreased relative to the same time period for 2009.