ROANOKE TIMES 
                      Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times

DATE: Monday, March 31, 1997                 TAG: 9703310001
SECTION: EDITORIAL                PAGE: A-6  EDITION: METRO 


ACCESSORIES TO CRIME-FIGHTING

The law can punish violators, but those who would live in peace must help prevent violence in the first place.

POLICE AND prisons can catch criminals and lock them up, but keeping people from committing crimes in the first place has to be everyone's job. More and more private groups are recognizing that necessity and acting - not as vigilantes, but as organizers of peaceful violence-prevention projects within their communities.

And private foundations are beginning to underwrite their efforts.

This is a hopeful response to the despair violence is creating, especially among children. Philanthropic foundations were finding that crime and its consequences were interfering with the work they were trying to do. So fighting crime has become part of that work.

For example, The Christian Science Monitor reported recently, the A.L. Mailman Family Foundation in White Plains, N.Y., began receiving requests from Head Start teachers for help dealing with grieving preschoolers for whom violence has become part of daily life. It joined with others to establish the National Funding Collaborative on Violence Prevention.

It and groups like it are giving financial and administrative help to small, innovative projects such as the Pro-Youth Coalition in Santa Barbara, Calif., which teaches parents strategies for keeping their 10- to 14-year-olds from choosing lives of crime.

Successes are small in proportion to the problem. But they are seeds from which larger success can grow, spreading the hope that children can grow up violence-free.


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