I admire and support John Canda

Mayor Potter has fired John Canda, who he appointed citywide gang prevention coordinator just last year. I’m horrified and outraged. I cannot believe Mr. Canda would suddenly stop doing good work in this area, as the Mayor apparently is alleging. It’s also not credible that the supposed reason is “because he was rarely in the office and often could not be located.” When you hire the best person in the city to do a job, you don’t gauge their productivity by the number of hours they’re sitting behind their desk – particularly in a job like gang outreach. Was Mr. Canda supposed to interrupt conversations with young people in crisis to take cell phone calls from City Hall? And shouldn’t job performance be rated on outcomes in the community, rather than whether the Mayor’s office staff knew John Canda’s schedule?

Last August, Maxine Bernstein wrote of the defunding of gang outreach staff in the Northeast neighborhoods after Mr. Canda moved from keeping their program afloat to City Hall, in an Oregonian article preserved on Gangwar.com. She wrote:

“Multnomah County paid for the gang outreach program until 1995. Since then, a combination of city and United Way dollars and other public and private grants have kept it going. Today, $35,000 is left in its budget, money from the Portland Police Bureau.

The city has done little to keep the program going, and the county has shifted its focus.”

“Mayor Tom Potter expects to hire a grant writer to work with Canda to find money for outreach, said Maria Rubio, Potter’s public safety liaison. [Mr. Charles] Ford [a member of the Northeast Neighborhoods coalition board] and others say it’s a little late.”

Google John Canda, and you’ll find nothing but praise and a long record of good work in anti-gang programs. In January of this year, Mayor Potter himself called John Canda a “proven leader” in his State of the City address to the City Club. And on Mayor Potter’s website’s blog entry titled “Working together to prevent Youth Violence”, one Sarah Ross commented in December 2006: “As a past employee of Youth Gangs Outreach, and present youth worker, I am very supportive of the goals and objectives of the Office of Youth Violence Prevention. I hold John Canda in high esteem as one of the most competant and dedicated individuals working in Portland to reduce youth violence…“

Indeed, this week’s edition of The Skanner carries an article extolling the success of a recent project.

” City funds programs with ‘proven track record’

Oregon Outreach’s summer school, known officially as the “Summer Education, Employment Development Program,” is modeled after Black’s McCoy Academy, which takes in teens who have been expelled from regular high schools. Over the past eight years, the McCoy Academy has had dozens of success stories. It is, in the words of Portland Mayor Tom Potter, “a program that works.”

And that’s exactly the type of program that Potter had in mind when he created a pool of grant money to be doled out by his new Office of Youth Violence Prevention. “When I created this office in 2006, gang outreach workers were working 12 hours or more every day and were struggling to keep their programs going,” Potter says.

Headed by longtime anti-gang activist John Canda, the mayor’s Office of Youth Violence Prevention, wasn’t trying to reinvent the wheel. Instead, Canda and his staff reached out to community organizations that had already proven effective in the fight against youth violence – organizations like Oregon Outreach.”

Google shows a string of outreach work by Mr. Canda, speaking at Neighborhood Associations, crisis meetings, community forums. And even this post, on a site with a name I normally wouldn’t link to, which gives a sobering picture of the lives of young people involved in gangs in Portland — with no hint of condemnation of those working to help. In it, Mr. Canda is quoted speaking out on the role of community and individual responsibility.

That article was written while John Canda was still based in the Northeast Coalition offices. I simply can’t believe that Mr. Canda could have suddenly started performing so poorly in a field he’s led for so many years, that he deserves to be fired. Not even allowed to resign with dignity, yet – the Mayor issued a statement saying he had asked him to resign or be dismissed. It doesn’t make sense, and Mr. Canda deserves better after so many years’ service to gang-involved youth and our community.