Charities Renew Efforts on Guns and Teen-Agers After Colorado Killings

The night after 14 students and a teacher were shot to death at a suburban Denver high school, Aricia LaFrance got no sleep.

Like millions of people in Colorado and across the country, Ms. LaFrance, who runs a charity that helps pregnant teen-agers, was appalled by the emerging details of the murder-suicide mission carried out by two students at Columbine High School, in Littleton.

But her sleepless night was not in vain. By the following morning, Ms. LaFrance, who lives near Littleton, had already come up with a plan to start a new program to help troubled youths. She hopes within a few weeks to open Project Listen, a coffee house where kids can “hang out,” she says.

Ms. LaFrance is just one of many charity leaders who are working hard to find ways to harness the outpouring of support that has come in the wake of the shooting and bombing spree. She has received phone calls from individuals and local businesses offering donations of everything from coffee and food to a renovated boxcar that could be used to house the program.

But Project Listen will be stocked with more than just coffee beans. Grief counselors and mentors will be on hand, as well as books to read and areas where kids can do homework or just sit and be by themselves. It might have a greenhouse, and a telescope for looking at the stars.

“Kids have gotten so used to destroying, it would be wonderful if they could do some nurturing,” Ms. LaFrance says.

She says she deliberately designed Project Listen to be a long-term effort, to help kids just now reaching adolescence.

“Maybe we won’t prevent the next 17-year-old from doing something, but by God we’re going to prevent one five years from now.”

Ms. LaFrance says she chose a long-term project because many of the other charitable efforts that have sprung up since the shooting are already providing immediate assistance to those who were affected by the tragedy, and working to rebuild the morale of a devastated community.

Several memorial funds have been established, for example. The Mile High United Way, together with the Denver Post and the Robert R. McCormick Tribune Foundation, which owns a television and a radio station in the Denver area, has established the Healing Fund to provide support to victims’ families. The Littleton Jaycees are seeking donations to help rebuild the school’s library, where much of the carnage took place.

But others, like Ms. LaFrance, are hoping they can sustain the good will long after the tragedy disappears from the headlines. For example, some of the money from the Healing Fund, which has already raised more than $500,000, will be used to support local charities that offer youth violence-prevention programs.

Metro Volunteers, a non-profit organization that matches volunteers with charities, will try to keep the interest of the more than 500 people who have called to offer assistance.

“We’re going to send them a list of places that need help, along with letters reminding them that the need exists year-round,” says Jackie Norris, the executive director.

In Washington, the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence and its sister organization, Handgun Control, which lobbies for tougher gun-restriction laws, are mailing information to hundreds of people who have called since the shootings, in hopes of gaining new members and support for gun-control measures.

Meanwhile, the Denver Leadership Foundation, which holds its 12th annual Colorado Prayer Luncheon this week, is reorganizing the event to focus on the Littleton tragedy.

Don Reeverts, president of the foundation, says up to 1,200 political, corporate, academic, and civic leaders from all over Colorado are expected to attend the luncheon.

Mr. Reeverts has also asked three charities that match adult volunteers with troubled youths to set up information booths. He plans to have cards at each place setting where luncheon attendees can sign up to become mentors or do other volunteer work. His hope is to recruit some 200 volunteers.

“We’re going to tell them, ‘If you feel so led, love a kid, take on a kid.’”

While there is no shortage of programs around the nation intended to help troubled, violence-prone youth, many non-profit leaders agree that more needs to be done to stem the deadly trend of gun-wielding teen-agers turning on their peers, whether in schools or on the street.

“One of the things we still don’t understand is why kids are so willing to use guns,” says Carol Breslau, a senior program officer at the Colorado Trust.

The foundation is in the midst of a five-year, $6.5-million violence-prevention program, in which grantees in 26 Colorado cities and towns received support to develop ways to reduce violent behavior. Although the program is not limited to youth violence, most of the grantees are focusing on it, Ms. Breslau says.

The foundation also financed a study on youth and handgun violence. The study, by the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence at the University of Colorado at Boulder, found that nationwide, handgun homicides committed by boys aged 15 to 18 rose 300 per cent between 1988 and 1993. In Colorado, the rate climbed from 4 in 100,000 in 1986 to 26 per 100,000 in 1992.

As a result of the findings, released about a month before the shootings at Columbine High School, the foundation announced it would award $500,000 in grants to one or possibly more Denver-area charities to help them add a gun-violence-prevention component.

Several other grant makers have also taken up the issue of gun violence among youth.

Since 1993, the California Wellness Foundation has devoted more than $30-million to a 10-year, $60-million violence-prevention program that seeks to get everyone from policy makers to medical professionals to civic leaders to treat youth violence as a public-health epidemic rather than a criminal-justice problem.

The Joyce Foundation, in Chicago, has devoted more than $13-million to gun-violence prevention since 1993.

Among other things, the foundation has provided support for research on ways to prevent gun violence through public policy and through public-health programs.

The number of programs to help children deal constructively with their anger has also proliferated, experts say. Many schools now offer curricula that work with children to develop social skills from an early age.

One such program, Second Step, was developed in 1988 by the Committee for Children, a Seattle charity that creates educational programs that promote the safety and well-being of children. It now operates in 10,000 schools and in each state of the country.

Other programs, meanwhile, have sprung up to help those who have been victims of such tragedies cope better long after the violence has ended.

In Jonesboro, Ark., where last year four girls and a teacher were shot to death and 10 others were wounded when two boys opened fire in a schoolyard, charity workers are still helping those affected put their lives back together.

Shortly after the March 1998 incident, the Rev. David Gill, a Presbyterian pastor who runs a camp outside Little Rock, decided to design a week-long program at the camp for the kids who survived. Mr. Gill, who had helped organize retreats for survivors of the massive bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, wanted to give the children — sixth and seventh graders — the opportunity to get away.

“I knew how powerfully healing a week of camp can be for young people,” he says. Using $33,000 — mostly donations from Presbyterian churches in Arkansas — he organized a program that included art and music therapy, among other things, to help the kids express their feelings.

The camp was so successful that Mr. Gill organized another one that took place near the first anniversary of the shooting. During that week, the kids helped to clean up a small town that had been devastated by tornadoes.

“The best way of helping yourself is by helping others,” Mr. Gill says. Two more camps are planned for the summer.

Mr. Gill says that he plans to offer a similar program to those affected by the siege at Columbine High School in Colorado.

“At the point when they’re ready to talk about long-term help,” he says, “we’ll be here.”