Networking in Miami

This week has been fun, a couple of my friends came over to Miami on holiday for a few days so met up with them a couple of times which has been really nice and have seen the sights of Miami. Went on a couple of trips around the place to see the main attractions and cant believe how friendly and welcoming some people are. I went on one trip on my own and ended up chatting to a girl on the trip who was on her on too and we ended spending the whole day together and meeting up the following day before she went home. That was really nice, now i have a new friend in Charlotte which is cool!

I also visited another organisation. As a result of my trip on Monday, i have now been able to able to set up a couple more visits as the Director at the Juvenile Assessment Centre had a few contacts and forwarded them to me which was really helpful. I contacted them and was able to organise a visit to Turner Guilford and Knight Correctional Facility so that i could attend a group that is run there by a lady called Barbara Wade. She is very active in working with gang members both inside and outside prison and attends the Prison twice a week to run this course. It is called RESPECT and is for young boys from 14-17 to learn life skills. It was a very interesting experience as the prison is very different to the one in which i am working and the client group is much younger. All of the young people that i spoke to were on remand and had been at the facility for a considerable length of time.

The group consisted of 12 young people and a the beginning of the session everyone stood up and repeated a verse about respecting each other and having a positive attitude to centre the group and focus on the session. Afterwards everyone sat in a circle and we spoke about the gang problems and what it was like for young people living in that type of life style. It became quite apparent to me that many of these young people, prior to coming to prison had never left their neighborhoods and they said that many of them had very unstable family life's with absent parents, drug issues and younger siblings to look after. Due to this many of them no longer attended school and gravitated towards the gang lifestyle as they were looking for somewhere to belong, someone to care for and love them and were searching for that feeling of being wanted and needed. It was a very interesting discussion and was good to hear it from the young people themselves. They were very welcoming to me and when it came to asking me questions, many of them did not know anything about England and where abouts in the world it was and for many of them it was the first time they had heard a British accent and some struggled to understand what i said. It was sad to see to as their world prior to now had only consisted of a few square miles of their neighbourhood.

This was a very worthwhile session to attend. From this contact with Barbara, she then set up a meeting for me for this week with the Gang Task Force in Miami which i am very much looking forward too.