'Unbenign Neglect' at the Cambridge YRB....

THINGS HAVE NOT gotten any better in East Cambridge since Larry Largey was allegedly beaten to death by two Cambridge policemen. Over 500 windows were broken in Roosevelt Towers last month alone. Rubbish and beer cans, many of them drained by the kids, litter the hallways. Shut out of the Langley Teen Center by the Recreation Department, kids hang out under the protected benches or in the shadows of the same doorways they have frequented for the last three years.

There have been no major improvements in the lives of kids here or anywhere else in the city. Kids are still stealing cars; kids are still popping pills or shooting heroin. The possibility of running into the type of hotshot that killed Kevin Harris, a black kid from the Riverside section of Cambridge, is still very high.

But the city has an answer to the needs of kids like Larry Largey and Kevin Harris, and those kids you see hanging out on your streetcorners. It is the two-and-a-half-year-old Youth Resources Bureau, the only social service agency in town specifically mandated to deal with "juvenile delinquency." The day Kevin died of an OD there were no formal programs for Riverside. But plans were afoot--for a program that would teach black girls their self-identity, through a cosmetics course.

"The Bureau had pledged to do something about the drug problem in Riverside," Joe Ferolito, a former staff member said recently, discussing Kevin Harris' death. "When a couple of us complained that a cosmetics program would in no way help, that a kid had died, the administrators just shrugged it off."

The history of the Cambridge YRB is shot through with similar instances of neglect, inaction, and total incomprehension of the needs of its constituency. Designed primarily as a power broker for Cambridge youth, the Bureau has consistently refused even to speak out as an agency on the most visible community issue ever to face its clientele: the death of Larry Largey.

Internally, the Bureau is torn by conflict between its staff of streetworkers (the people who deal directly with the kids) and an administration that is undermining their programs and proposals. Many see the Bureau as either a waste of time, or an outright detriment to kids. Staff turnover has been high, and tangible accomplishments by the Bureau are almost impossible to find.

AN OUTGROWTH of the 1967 Safe Streets Act, the YRB receives 75 per cent of its quarter-million dollar core budget from the Governor's Committee on Law Enforcement (GCLE); most of the rest comes from the city of Cambridge. The Bureau is supposed to emphasize changing the systems that control the city's youth rather than merely to approach each kid as an individual problem.

But an unreleased evaluation conducted by the GCLE funding committee during the time of the Largey incident said that "the bureau has done its best work in its lower priority areas" of individual contact. The report concluded that the Bureau's structure had effectively "insulated the administration both from other staff and the client population." And it termed the core Bureau's four-level decision-making process "needlessly complex" for a staff of 13.

The evaluators also said that the Bureau's two satellite projects, the East Cambridge Job Bank and the Jefferson Park Delinquency Prevention Project, were failing to fulfill the general mandate, but were functioning well on the level of individual contact.

To put it plainly, the streetworkers seem to be doing their jobs, but the administration remains inadequate and out of touch. And most of the blame seems to fall on the Bureau's director, Kerry Saravelas.

Saravelas is a tall, heavy-set, 36-year-old man who runs the Cambridge YRB from behind a large plate glass window on Mass Ave. The son of Greek immigrant parents, Saravelas grew up in West Roxbury and studied in Greek Orthodox seminaries for six years before "running away" to Chicago at the age of 26 to get a degree in psychiatric social work. He has a penchant for phrasing things in "ethical" terms, and, according to a number of present and former staff members, a tendency to look for the causes of kids' problems inside their own heads rather than out on the street and in the institutions where the causes usually are.

Saravelas came to Cambridge from a job as the director of a Young Men's Jewish Council Youth Center in Chicago. He was appointed by City Manager Corcoran after being selected by a board of directors that included politically connected Judge Lawrence Feloney, a. clergyman, and representatives of the schools, the police, the probation department, and the Shady Hill crowd. After Saravelas was hired, the board reverted to a simple advisory role, and Saravelas found himself a comfortable house on the North Shore.

Kids I spoke with who were connected with YRB were almost all vehemently critical both of Saravelas and his Bureau, though some liked individual staff members. "Raymond [a pseudonym for a former streetworker] introduced me to the Bureau, but the Bureau hasn't done shit," said one Dana Street kid. "The only thing that was done for me that was considered part of the Bureau was that Raymond got me a job at a gas station. And that was on his own time--he went down at night."

"One of their big problems is that they got too many bosses," said a 17-year-old from North Cambridge. "They don't have enough people out on the street getting to know the kids. The only time I saw a lot of them out on the street was when the shit was going down in East Cambridge (during the Largey incident). And then they were all just running around. They didn't know what to do. They really wanted in on that. Maybe the word came down from City Hall to get the kids off the street."

LARRY LARGEY HIMSELF had been on the YRB's caseload. But although the Bureau referred him to an alcoholism program at the hospital, no one seems to have ever worked with him directly. During the riots following his death, certain Bureau administrators were patrolling the streets with expensive new walkie-talkies. Part of the strategy was to get kids to wear armbands identifying the neighborhoods from which they came, supposedly for the protection of those who were connected with the Bureau. Saravelas, meanwhile, was riding around in a car with Police Chief Reagan. Although the staff members wanted to take a stand, Saravelas said that by so doing the Bureau would only alienate the police department. So the CYRB said nothing, refused even to call for an investigation of Larry's death. Said one North Cambridge youth, "They work for the city. They do whatever the city says. They were on the city's side."

When I asked a black kid who had recently moved from Riverside to North Cambridge what the Bureau had done for him, he paused for a long time, shook his head, and finally said, "The Bureau never did nothing for me. They tried--they said--but I can't think of anything. They're not even hiring the kind of people the kids want. I used to hear them talking about all the cars being stolen in North Cambridge but they never send anybody down to help stop it. They're not offering any alternatives."

None of this seems to touch the well-insulated Mr. Saravelas. When I walked into his office two Thursdays ago, I mistakenly sat in his large black chair. Accommodatingly, Saravelas insisted I remain there, and began to expound on his agency in the most fluent bureaucratese: "Our big emphasis for '73 will be on working more cooperatively with existing agencies and on trying to influence them to reallocate their resources," he began. "Basically, we have concentrated on a direct service approach, but now we're moving into forming coalitions with other groups to effect systems changes." (He failed to mention that the GCLE had directed all state YRBs to emphasize systems changes for 1972.)

"In our two-year history, we have had an uphill battle with the police department," he continued, dreamily oblivious of the impression created by riding in a police car during the Largey riots. "But today, we are beginning to be recognized by some of the people who thought we were awful, some of the people who had to compete with us. Now they are saying, 'They certainly have a good relationship with the kids.'

"We also have been very fortunate in our relationships with the courts. One judge who is on our board (Feloney) has interceded on our behalf, and this has filtered down to the probation staff. I consider these accomplishments major. We feel that we have a solid working relationship with kids in every area of the city. We also feel that with the kids we've come in contact with, we have excellent relationships with their parents."

BUT, LIKE THE KIDS, many parents feel left out of the Bureau's decision-making process, and alienated from the Bureau's administration, though again, some said they liked individual staff members. Also like the kids, parents I spoke with asked to remain anonymous, usually for fear that one of the administrators would make their kids suffer for any criticisms they might have.

"I was very turned off by Kerry," a Bay Street parent said. "I haven't seen any programs in my area, and I only live a stone's throw from the office. What's more, every time you'd call down there, they'd be in a meeting. But what good's a meeting if the parents aren't coming? After all, the neighborhoods are what's going to hold this country together. So you should work with the neighborhoods, not just in them."

One East Cambridge mother was critical of the entire Bureau, from the administrators right down to the street-workers. "My general impression is disgust," she said. "They make promises, promises, promises, and never follow through. Some of the kids around the Towers call them backstabbers. When the kids call them up, they come out and act like they're doing the kids a big favor. But it's their job--they're getting paid for it."

Then there are those who don't know enough about the Bureau to comment, even though their son or daughter had extended contact with the YRB. Councillor Saundra Graham goes further. "You could call up every mother in Riverside, and I'd bet only one or two of them knows anything about the Bureau," Graham, herself the mother of five, said last week. "They may know some of the street-workers, but they were around before the Bureau ever started."

"We believe very much in the confidentiality of kids," Saravelas told me; "we have never talked to any authorities without consulting the kids first." In fact, the Bureau was planning at one point to compile extensive records on kids in every neighborhood in the city. They wanted to know where the kids hung out, who the leaders were, what kinds of things the kids were doing. But to their dismay, the staff protested over the possible misuse of such records, and the idea had to be abandoned. "When I heard about that, I called up Kerry and told him ain't nobody filling out anything on my kids without me knowing about it," Saundra Graham says.

"I told Sonny Cox and Livvy Jones [two Riverside streetworkers] that the kids in Riverside need two things: they need education and they need jobs," says Graham. "But it seems like the proposal for a job bank in Riverside got killed. They have no programs for black people. Kerry wanted to set up an alcoholic program; he wanted Livvy to bring in alcoholics. But the kids in Riverside aren't drinking, they're popping pills. They need drug programs."

WHEN I ASKED Saravelas what the Bureau was doing about drugs in Riverside, his answer was simple enough. "That's a can of worms. It's not tough for us, but the political climate is a can of worms. The Cambridge Coordinating Committee on Drugs is in a state of limbo. There's $1.5 million waiting to come into the city for heroin addiction, and some of the black groups aren't sure they'll get a piece of it." In short, drugs, according to Kerry Saravelas, "are not our mandate."

What is the YRB's mandate is to emphasize systemic change. Last spring, Saravelas gave the go-ahead to four staff members who were preparing original programs designed to meet that need: silk-screening, legal, and newsletter projects, as well as long-range plans for a bail fund project, a medical program, a youth union, and a guerilla theater group.

But after giving them the word to proceed, after having them submit timetables and fairly detailed descriptions of their proposals, Saravelas told them that there was no money to implement their projects. Fed up with such treatment, three of the four staff members left the Bureau a short time later.

No money? Sources inside the Bureau said last week that approximately $40,000 of the YRB's budget has been left unspent and that it may now be too late to recover the funds. If true, the situation at the YRB becomes even more appalling. Not only will staff members have been deceived, but the kids of Cambridge will have lost a huge chunk of money that is rightfully theirs.

LAST WEEK RON SILVA, the Bureau's program administrator, showed me a list of twenty-odd programs that were "on the slate," but when I spoke to Saravelas he could name only four programs currently in operation (excluding the Bureau's two $50,000 satellite projects and an educational census conducted in conjunction with the schools and a number of other city agencies). They were a Junior Advocate program (which trains youth to do counseling work), a psychology program, an alcoholism program in conjunction with the hospital, and the cosmetics program.

However, the Bureau did take steps recently to reopen the Langley Teen Center under community direction. This seems to be a step in the right direction, and without Saravelas's efforts, the negotiations may never have gotten off the ground. But this proposal originated with a staff member, and some are wondering if Saravelas backed it because of some larger aspirations for increasing his own prestige by taking over parts of other city departments.

Kerry Saravelas calls Joe Tyree "my most charismatic streetworker." A short but powerfully built black man in his middle thirties, Tyree is balding on top with a fuzzy growth around the sides and a twinkle in his eyes that give his face the look of a wise Bozo-The-Clown. He grew up in Cambridge and has been working with the kids here for years. Most of the kids seem to like him, although they think he sometimes works too much within the system.

Tyree is the man who runs the CYRB's Junior Advocate program, of which Saravelas is so mightily proud. Saravelas is also proud of Tyree and suggested I speak to him.

"Kerry could do a fuck of a lot of things he doesn't do," Tyree began. "Any director should be seen in the community he's working in, but Kerry isn't. You just can't run an agency like this from an office; it has to be from the streetcorners where the real people are. The kids are honest, they tell us what they need. We should be telling City Hall what the kids need. you should make some allowances about how the city is fucked up, but we shouldn't be impeded this much. If I go up with a good program, the money should be there. But it isn't.

"We're a paper operation. I mentioned the idea of a summer camp when I first started working--that was December of '70. We finally got it off the ground a year ago. It seems like the way things are set up, the salaries outweigh the program expenditures five to one."

As a black man, Tyree is particularly critical of the Bureau's approach to racial problems. "The social patterns of the black community and the white community are different," he said. "Programs that work in the white community don't necessarily work in the black community. But we don't have any programs dealing with racism, for example. Any agency using federal money should have programs dealing with racism." Which brought up the Bureau's cosmetics program.

"That program's based on that whole premise that people are what they look like, not what they really are," Tyree said. (Sharon Shelton, in charge of this program, had her picture appear recently in the Cambridge Chronicle. To the amazement of Saundra Graham and others, she was listed as a "black community leader.") "If you explain to someone enough good reasons to wash, then they'll wash. I'm not going to say that I know what's good for girls all the time--I guess I'm a male chauvinist pig from way back. But I think that money is in the wrong place. That kid from Riverside who died last summer could just as easily been a girl: dope doesn't care. If it's a hotshot, you're going. Black people used to cut their skins and put bones in their noses. That was part of their culture even if it wasn't what white people approved of. In my mind, that cosmetology program is assimilation to white culture."

As we were talking, another staff member came into the Bureau and joined our conversation. "You can be what we are--a typical city agency--or you can outmaneuver the politicians," she said. "If we had the right director and the director could get the ear of the City Manager, we could do more. I'm sure it's because of Kerry that we're getting fucked around. The perfect example is Largey. We all wanted to take a stand, but Kerry wouldn't do it. We were in a good bargaining position, but the Bureau backed down. The people trust us, then we come back with an empty bag. I'd say the people have been overly patient."

THEN OUR CONVERSATION turned to matters more internal to the Bureau. Like a large number of their co-workers, these two complained that Saravelas used to kill their proposals by saying that the Bureau's board of directors had vetoed them. Later, the staff learned that the board only had advisory powers. When Saravelas hired Ron Silva for the newly created post of program administrator, thereby reversing the decision of the hiring committee, dissension was widespread. Saravelas dissolved all total staff meetings, and six staff members, including Tyree, signed a letter calling for Saravelas's resignation.

There is also evidence which indicates that Saravelas may have withheld the GCLE evaluation from some of the staff. The evaluation was mailed in separate envelopes to each and every member of the Bureau's core staff. But when I checked with members of the agency to see if they had received their copy, which was mailed to them in care of the Bureau, a few said that they had not. Little did Cambridge know that when it hired a director for its youth Resources Bureau it may also have hired a postmaster.

So his Bureau slips and slides, leaving tension and ill-will in its wake. And Kerry Saravelas does nothing. Or does he? And if he does, just what kinds of things has Saravelas been doing for his $18,600 salary?

"Not a fucking thing," said Joe Tyree finally. "Not for what $18,600 is supposed to do. I don't like back-stabbing, but fuck it. If he can't take a little now and then, fuck it. I may lose my job for saying all this. But what the fuck. I was doing the same things before the Bureau started, and I'll be doing the same things after it's over. It'll be easy for Kerry because he's got a college degree."

IT APPEARS THAT Saravelas is already trading on that. Not only does he teach a class at North Shore Community College, but he is apparently doing consulting work on the side as well. Present and former staff members say they saw an unsigned contract on his desk. Moreover, a colleague of mine, posing as a representative of a fictitious community group from Martha's Vineyard, told Saravelas that he had an $8 to $10,000 allocation for staff training consultation to a program similar to the YRB and asked who Saravelas would recommend for the job. Saravelas said that he could not recommend any established "soft-ware" consulting corporation but that he could arrange for the job to be handled by "a group of individuals who haven't formed into a corporation yet." Saravelas said that he and his colleagues all had experience with "how you set up such programs and what it means to be a worker in an outreach agency."

When told that among the stipulations of the prospective client's grant was the mandate that consulting work be done by consulting firms and not by individuals, Saravelas said that the Planning Council of the United Community Services of Greater Boston could be induced to serve as the formal contractor. His group could then sub-contract from them. Saravelas concluded the conversation by asking that a copy of the Martha's Vineyard program proposal be mailed special delivery to his home in Beverly. Given all that had come before, it seemed like a good thing for Martha's Vineyard that the contracting proposition was fictitious.

As for Cambridge, it is long past time for the city to meet the needs of its juvenile population fully and tangibly, not merely with cosmetic solutions. But informed sources say that because of the neglect, ineptitude, and mismanagement of the Cambridge YRB (revealed to them in part by the evaluation cited above), the Governor's Committee has decided to delay funding for the Bureau until March, and has cut the new budget by nearly $90,000. Kids in Cambridge could use that money, and it is a shame if they have to forfeit it, apparently because of the doings of a man who drives in from the suburbs to watch them parade past the picture window of his $1200-a-month Mass Ave offices. It is a shame that kids have so few substantive programs in their neighborhoods, and it is a shame that their parents seem to have so little impact on the central decision-making processes.

WHEN I CALLED Saravelas last week to give him a chance to respond to the charges and criticisms that had been levelled at him and at the Bureau, he told me that he could produce "as many positive reactions as you can write negative," and that until I submitted an outline of my article in writing, "you can't talk to us anymore." The outline he mentioned, as explained to me earlier in the week by Ron Silva, the Bureau's program administrator, was to include the specific purpose of my article, the costs and benefits to the Bureau of the time that staff members would spend talking to me, and the specific questions I wanted to ask the staff.

Maybe Saravelas can come up with a host of positive comments. But there are enough negative ones turning in the minds of Cambridge kids, parents, current and former staff, (as well as private and public agency personnel), to offset the forces he can muster--at least in number and significance, if not in political power and prestige. Until I'm proven wrong, I'll have to go with the assessment of Sister Mary Griffin of Croagh Patrick's, a well-known community worker:

"The YRB came, like all other agencies, as the savior agency of Cambridge. They poured workers out on the street who were untrained and had great difficulty mobilizing and working with adults. As soon as they determined the needs of an area, they were never out on the street again. They never addressed themselves to the causes. They said, 'please, don't send the kids away,' but they never addressed themselves to the injustice in the system. They were merely duplicating services: making referrals to Catholic Charities, making referrals to the welfare office.

"When they were needed most of all, the director was plastered against the wall of the police station. They did absolutely nothing. If you go through the projects, you'll see that the kids have never been so bad; they're all still controlled by the institutions. The streetworkers are still seen as outsiders. They come in and they go out. There's no stability or continuity of service."

A 15-YEAR-OLD North Cambridge kid put it this way: "The way things are set up now, the Bureau fucks kids up more than it helps them. They should fire Kerry and get someone in there who can do something. Sure, kids still go there for help. But after they figure the place out, they won't come back."

Joe Tyree and others have laid their jobs on the line by speaking openly and frankly for the record. As this is written, the YRB administration is already attempting to ferret out other staff members with whom I spoke in confidence and without the prior knowledge of the Bureau administration. It is up to City Manager John Corcoran to insure that they will not be punished for their honesty and candor. And--if the city really cares about kids like Larry Largey and Kevin Harris and the kids who hang out on Cambridge streetcorners--it is also up to Corcoran to reassess the city's present commitment to its youth. Corcoran must take the initiative to set up a CYRB board of directors that is truly representative of the community; a board of directors that has the power to hire and fire the Bureau's director; a board that can truly participate in the Bureau's decision-making process