This is more of a story about Carolyn Phillips than the conference she is hosting come Saturday.
It all starts with her. She had wanted to give her son and her daughter, then in their early teens, a grounding in public service. She called the NAACP.
She reached Menola Upshaw, then president of the Denver branch. Surely, she inquired, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People must have activities for youths in Denver.
No, she was told, but feel free to start a youth chapter all the same.
That was 16 years ago. Carolyn Phillips, who intended to step away from the Denver Youth Council when her youngest child graduated from high school more than 10 years ago, remains its adviser.
On Saturday, she will host the council’s sixth “Jail Is No Place To Be Somebody” crime-prevention conference from 8:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. at East High School.
This year’s theme, “Wrong Time, Wrong Place, Wrong Person,” intrigued me. Turns out, a teenage girl thought it up.
“It is about what happens when you’re hanging out with your friends, it’s after curfew and the police show up. Everybody goes to jail is what happens,” explained Raven Johnson-Bailey, a 15-year-old student at George Washington High who has been on the council since age 9.
The 23-member council put together a schedule of workshops and invited more than a dozen speakers, not to mention a clutch of imprisoned women.
The idea, as in past years, is to give children and their parents, Carolyn Phillips said, the tools, information and guts to remain safe and free from peer pressure and a host of societal ills that every year in Colorado sends scores of young people into the arms of the criminal-justice system.
“Mostly,” she said, “the overall theme is teaching kids what happens when they go places they shouldn’t be, with people they shouldn’t be with.”
Psychologists and leaders of different Denver youth groups will lead workshops on how to recognize signs that a child is headed for trouble.
“Have they withdrawn from you?” Carolyn Phillips illustrates. “Have their grades dropped? Do you know who their friends are? We will have parents speak about how they missed the signs with their own children.”
State Rep. Rhonda Fields, D-Aurora, will give the keynote on the impact of violence on the family. Her son, Javad, was shot to death along with his fiancee, Vivian Wolfe, in 2005 to prevent him from testifying at trial over a gang killing.
A Denver Public Schools psychologist for 21 years, Carolyn Phillips set out through the youth council to mentor as many children as she could sign up.
The kids on the council range in age from 9 to their early 20s. Today, among other things, they assist homeless children and distribute scarves, socks, toiletries and the like to homeless people. On Mother’s Day, they provide food and cards to elderly women.
“I just couldn’t retire from this,” Phillips said. “I tried, but every year brought new kids, each of them so willing to work and to learn.”
She expects that as many as 350 parents and children will attend the free conference this year.
I had one last question: How did she arrange to have state inmates attend?
“We asked,” she said.
“You know, at the last conference, we had male inmates. They spoke about the mistakes they made, the regrets they had.
“One gentleman, and I will never forget this, told of how on the prison bus on his way to the conference he passed by the house where his children live, of how he could not be allowed to see them.
“These are the stories we will share.”
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
