Funding from city gives youths the means to help others

Sito Negron

Friday, Feb. 20, 2004 | 5:38 a.m.

WEEKEND EDITION

Feb. 21-22, 2004

Few people generally show up when the Las Vegas City Council decides to spend millions of dollars on projects that people take for granted -- such as streets, for example.

But the council chamber was packed this week with hundreds of students anticipating the approval of $30,000 toward a project that allows the students to serve their fellow Las Vegans in direct ways, such as creating care packages, hosting holiday parties and tutoring other youth.

"We can't thank you enough," Mayor Oscar Goodman told them. The audience applauded when council unanimously approved the $30,000 in funding.

Alexis Kourafas is a 17-year-old grant review board member who helps decide who receives grants from the Youth Neighborhood Association Partnership Program. Thirty groups received $1,000 each this year.

"This program means a lot to me personally," the Cimarron-Memorial High School senior, who serves as the board chairman, said. "It's great to see the kids reaching out, trying to make a difference and being involved in community service projects.

"We hear too often about negative aspects in the city of Las Vegas, and it's great to see kids making a difference," Kourafas said.

The program is run out of the city Neighborhood Services Department by Jocelyn Bluitt-Fisher, of whom Kourafas said "I can't say enough. She loves her job."

Bluitt-Fisher said the program has grown over its six years from $5,000 to the current $30,000.

She said the key is that "it truly is youth-driven."

While they have adult sponsors, the youths develop the ideas and implement them. Also, the board that Kourafas chairs, which decides what programs get funded, is made up of eight adults and seven teens.

The youths do everything "from beginning to end. I become their staff," Bluitt-Fisher said. "We want to get them into the role of being leaders. Problem-solving at that age prepares them."

Detrick Sanford, an 18-year-old freshman at UNLV, said in his two years on the board, "everyone's voice was heard. Everyone had one vote, and the adults didn't look down on the students."

The program "allows the youth of the community to do a community service project they plan themselves and they get their hands into and at the end they get to see the product," Sanford said. "It's nothing an adult dictates to them and says they have to do."

Cheyenne High School freshman Samantha Pfisterer, 14, is involved with her Girl Scout Troop 141 in a project to deliver dental supplies to kids.

"It started last April when a few of our girls went to a dental workshop at community college and found out 3,000 kids in the Las Vegas area go to bed with tooth pain," Pfisterer said. They started collecting toothbrushes and toothpaste, she said, and "that's when we wanted to make it bigger and help more kids."

Part of the project will entail developing a coloring book with word games and puzzles associated with dental hygiene, Pfisterer said.

"Then we're gonna put those in bags and hand them out," she said.

"People think teenagers don't get involved, but they're wrong," she said. "I like it because it's fun, you see people smile, you know you made their day better."