Agents of change | He reaches out to young gangsters

They make the news. They are agents of change in their field. But we know little or nothing about them. The Press presents it to you all summer long.

Caroline Touzin
The Press

“Pierreson, you do a lot of things for children and teenagers. What are you doing for us? »

” We. It is the young adults responsible for the crisis of urban violence that has shaken the northeast of Montreal for two years.

Pierreson Vaval could have received this criticism from a young gangster like a stab.

After all, the director of the RDP team has been committed for 25 years to preventing delinquency, violence, dropping out of school and drug addiction among vulnerable young people in Rivière-des-Prairies (RDP) and to combating these problems.

The 50-year-old community organizer saw it more as a cry for help. He has known them since they were little. He saw them grow and… fall. However, he reached out to them several times.

Today, he feels he can’t let them down.

They are young blacks who grew up in precariousness. They dropped out of school early. They committed offenses that led them to a youth center and then to prison. They feel excluded from the society in which they live.

Some have become fathers. They turn to what they know — fraud, drug dealing and other crimes — to support their families, Vaval says.

The first time that the representative of The Press met Mr. Vaval, it was in 2005, when Montreal was experiencing… an increase in armed violence linked to conflicts between street gangs. A sexagenarian had just been the victim of a gratuitous attack committed by three young gangsters.

“A drama like this will be repeated as long as the minorities from which our young people come are struggling with socio-economic and integration problems. Until young people themselves have strong, non-violent and positive role models around them,” the community organizer told us at the time.

Seventeen years have passed. Young people growing up in disadvantaged areas continue to kill each other. Their conflicts always claim innocent victims.

Pierreson Vaval’s analysis of the “systemic” origins of outbreaks of violence remains the same. The big guy with the contagious smile gives us an appointment for the interview at Don-Bosco Park. His organization funded a collective of artists last year to paint a mural there Black Lives Matter/ Black youth lives matter.

“Do you notice anything? he asks, pointing to the sports facilities. The skateboard park is vandalized. There is graffiti all over the place, but not on the fresco. »

” Something else ? “, he adds. Half a dozen young men are playing basketball under a blazing sun on this July day. They are all white.

Due to the increase in gun incidents, young black people are afraid to play in the park for fear of being targeted by street gang members who want to “make points” (known as the scoring) or being mistaken for a gang member.

Another collateral damage of the current crisis: Mr. Vaval feels an increase in tensions between young black people and the police. Young people without history, and even street workers from the organization, are arrested by agents, supposedly because they look like suspects.

Discouraged, the director of Équipe RDP? No, that’s not the type of this former elite basketball athlete. Born in Haiti, arrived in Montreal at 2 years old, he grew up on the Plateau. It was not easy to “find your place” in a working-class white neighborhood in the late 1970s and early 1980s, he says.

But on a basketball court, when he played for Jeanne-Mance high school and then in an elite program where he represented Montreal, he was applauded. His “young black identity” is valued, admired. “People had a favorable bias because they saw black people excelling at basketball on TV,” he recalls.

Beyond basketball

At 20, he moved with his family to Rivière-des-Prairies. In their housing cooperative, young people have made a basketball hoop out of a milk crate with holes in it. They play in the parking lot because they don’t have access to a nearby basketball court.

Pierreson Vaval no longer plays at a competitive level. He trained in technical drawing. He works for a publishing house.

The teenagers in his co-op beg him to play with them. He meets other young people from neighboring HLMs who have also improvised lots in parking lots.

The needs of these young people and their families are enormous, discovers Mr. Vaval. It goes far beyond sport.

Teenagers call him “Coach”. RDP was then shaken by a crisis of violence similar to the one currently being experienced. “The social cohesion essential to the development of the neighborhood seemed compromised,” he recalls. Everywhere I went, people asked me: what’s going on with young people? »

But no organization is ready to welcome these vulnerable teenagers, who are considered dangerous. It was there that, with the support of Jean-Grou high school and the City of Montreal, at the age of 25, he founded Équipe RDP. Basketball programs, then football, were created to counter school dropouts and fight against violence.

Question of intervening as soon as possible, the activities of the organization then extend to the neighboring elementary schools.

Today, Équipe RDP also manages recreation programs—including day camps—for the entire borough. The organization has nine permanent employees and about sixty seasonal workers. It serves approximately 10,000 people.

“There is now diversity among the animators. Children have positive role models who look like them,” he says proudly.

Construction rather than destruction

But how can we help marginalized young adults – actors in the current crisis – to get out of it?

Employment, answers Mr. Vaval. One of his street workers, Mac Clain Senat, himself a carpenter-joiner, came up with the idea of ​​a training program for construction trades in the field. The FTQ-Construction and Local 9 (carpenters-joiners) embarked on the adventure.

Thus, over the past year, 177 young people have benefited from the training program and 70 more are waiting to take part.

Candidates have been injured or killed in the current crisis, laments Mr. Vaval. But for others, it changed their life.

Équipe RDP also opened a new location this year for young adults – 16-35 years old – who want to confide in or get out of gangs. In recent months, it was no longer safe for his street workers to meet them at home, in parks or in their cars.

The community organizer was recognized by the Montreal Canadiens as part of Black History Month earlier this year. His contribution to the founding of the Pozé Coalition was highlighted: this group defending the interests of young Afro-Quebecers has been increasing media interventions for a year to remind the importance of acting on the root causes of the outbreak of violence, and not just on the symptoms.

While Quebec has invested 90 million in the fight against firearms in Operation Centaur, the Pozé Coalition is asking that an equivalent sum be invested in prevention. The government’s response has been timid, deplores Mr. Vaval. Since the start of the crisis, Team RDP has received $160,000 in new money; a grossly insufficient sum, he said. With this money, the organization manages to hire two “and a half” more workers.

“Let’s be serious”, he drops, we are dealing with “heavy cases” who are engaged in a “fratricidal war”. It is an army of social workers, psychologists and community workers that the northeast of the metropolis needs, he says.

“When the police ask; she receives. The response is immediate. We, in the community, while we know the solutions, we are told to fill out forms, we are overwhelmed with bureaucracy, deplores Mr. Vaval. Is it urgent or not? »