Students graduate in first-ever Violence Prevention certificate program
on June 3, 2011
The College of Alameda celebrated the first fifteen students to graduate from the Violence Prevention Initiative Certificate Program last night at Humanist Hall in Oakland.
Crystallee Crain, Adjunct Faculty at College of Alameda, and the instructor of this one-year program said this certificate is the first of its kind in California. The graduates, who happened to be from either Richmond or Oakland, are not your typical-aged college students. Most of them are in the 40s, and for almost all, this is a second degree. Crain said some of the students are leaving the program employed with the organizations they worked with during their service learning projects. Others will the return to their jobs as counselors, law enforcement officials and policy leaders, but now with additional skills in grant writing, leadership and working with other violence-prevention organizations.
3 Comments
Oakland North welcomes comments from our readers, but we ask users to keep all discussion civil and on-topic. Comments post automatically without review from our staff, but we reserve the right to delete material that is libelous, a personal attack, or spam. We request that commenters consistently use the same login name. Comments from the same user posted under multiple aliases may be deleted. Oakland North assumes no liability for comments posted to the site and no endorsement is implied; commenters are solely responsible for their own content.
Oakland North
Oakland North is an online news service produced by students at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and covering Oakland, California. Our goals are to improve local coverage, innovate with digital media, and listen to you–about the issues that concern you and the reporting you’d like to see in your community. Please send news tips to: oaklandnorthstaff@gmail.com.
Interesting program! Worth following these folks to see what they do with their training.
A case of alternate realities, parallel universes.
Community colleges are under terrible financial stress to provide the basic academic and vocational education that residents need, in part to overcome k-12 weaknesses.
And here the College decides to devote some of it’s precious scarce resources to providing a certificate program in a field that is largely a collection of make-work inner city programs that are political pork barrels.
To be sure Anti-Violence spending by governments has been a growth industry for the past decade.
The king’s new clothes aspect is that there is scant evidence that Violence Preventions work except for a very few participants at a very high cost per successful outcome.
If you ever listen to speakers from some of the local VP projects speak before the Oakland City Council, the most common proof they give of the success of their programs is that they have stayed out of jail because they have a job working as counselors for the program.
-len raphael, cpa
temescal
That would be fine if the programs hadn’t cost cities, counties, state, fed’s hundreds of millions of dollars over the years.
Money that should have been spent on improving proven ways to decrease unemployment such as Community College vocational training for health, automotive, and various service trades. Maybe expanding rec centers.
If the college had hoped to prepare students for advancing their careers or finding jobs in the VP programs, the College is about 2 years too late.
Local and state governments will be chopping those programs well before they close libraries and parks, and anywhere except Oakland, before they layoff cops.