The money is gone, but the violence remains.

Ten years after an unprecedented wave of teen shootings and killings shocked Colorado into funding hundreds of youth programs with millions of dollars, the money has dried up.

Many of those programs survive in reduced form, struggling to get by on private grants at a time when a slumping economy and increased street violence appear to be pointing the state toward a possible repeat of Denver's 1993 "Summer of Violence."

Last year Denver gang violence was up.

Drive-by shootings rose about 30 percent and stabbings about 20 percent, according to Denver Gang Bureau statistics.

Greg Willis, founder of the Colorado HAWKS (Hard at Work Kids), is feeling the impact of hard times and no money.

"The way it is now, with the money being as tight as it is and the economy, we have to turn kids away," he said. "If we had the money, we could double our size."

Willis, 47, formed HAWKS in 1997 as an escape route for inner-city kids who felt they had no way out of a cycle of drugs, gangs and violence.

Much of the HAWKS' $170,000 annual budget comes from private donations and small corporate grants.

For Willis, who uses a few thousand city dollars to teach 200 children how to turn basketball and good grades into college scholarhips, losing a grant means digging into his pocket to cover expenses and finding other ways to make a dollar last.

Willis gets up early each Saturday to coach a fourth-grade basketball team through a morning game, then rushes home to wash their uniforms so his fifth-grade team can wear them in an afternoon game.

"All of these programs operate on money," said Willis, "and a lot of these kids don't have any."

Denver-based Summer Scholars lost more than $300,000 in state and local money in the past year, executive director Anne Byrne said. Many of the city's and state's programs are facing the same problems, she said.

"The response to the Summer of Violence by policymakers was really very wonderful and positive in terms of investing in kids and the future, but now the rug has been pulled out from under us because of these cuts," Byrne said.

"I think they are letting the youth and the whole future of the state down. We are setting ourselves up for another summer or year or multiyears of violence."

In the fall of 1993, state and local legislators, reacting to public outcry, allocated millions of dollars to youth programs, primarily through Denver's Safe City and the state's Tony Grampsas Youth Services programs.

Dottie Wham, a former Republican senator from Denver, carried legislation that session and remembers that lawmakers were compelled by the dramatic nature of the crimes.

"There was great concern and a recognition that we were not doing a good job with our children," Wham said. "And some realization that there were ways to keep them out of adult prisons."

Legislators later crafted the Youth Crime Prevention and Intervention Act. The legislation increased funding for youth services and formed a board made up of private citizens and lawmakers to hand out the cash.

The board saw the grant money given to it by the legislature increase to $8.3 million in 1998, when 193 community programs across the state served about 99,000 Coloradans. In 2000, the program was renamed the Tony Grampsas Youth Services Program, in honor of its biggest advocate, the late state senator from Golden.

"It was intended to be seed money, not state support, and that approach really worked," said Larry Kallenberger, the board's first chairman.

"We went a long way in instilling the new ethic that you spend a lot less when we spend it up front on the kids rather on than on the back end on prisons."

Denver's Safe City program was created in much the same way.

In 1994 Mayor Wellington Webb announced $1 million in grants to be handed out by Denver's Safe City Office.

That first year, Safe City helped 47 programs, from the El Centro Su Teatro, which received $20,000 to teach children about theater, dance, music and art, to the $3,000 Norman J. Martin got to take kids fishing.

"After the summer, after the violence and killings, I decided I could make some type of difference, try to get the kids off the street," Martin said in a recent interview.

So Martin and his 13-year-old daughter wrote up a grant proposal and submitted it to the Safe City office.

His was a distinctly personal system. Each month Martin would gather up children who were fatherless, who had spent their summers roaming the streets looking for something to do, and take them camping or fishing, showing them a part of the world they never knew.

Then about three years ago Martin, who makes a living installing sprinkler systems, stopped the trips.

"I was getting older, and my wife's dad was having problems," said Martin, 61. "I wasn't going to be able to give 100 percent anymore."

Other programs quickly took Martin's place, as Safe City and the Tony Grampsas programs doled out millions of dollars.

But Denver's Safe City program soon began to dwindle. Grant money was cut in half in 2000 to $500,000, halved again in 2001 and finally killed this year.

Budget cuts hit the state at the same time.

For the 2002-'03 budget year, the Tony Grampsas board was to have about $9 million. It ended up with nothing, and next year's prognosis is uncertain.

"We made a big effort to try and restore a portion of the Tony Grampsas funding, but we weren't successful," said Doug Benevento, executive director of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, which oversees the program.

Safe City, which has given out $7.1 million to 496 groups, finds itself facing similar problems as it struggles to maintain a shrinking staff while trying to find money for the programs it helped create.

"The realism is that basic city services are decreasing and the number of young people are increasing," said Charlotte Stephens, director of Safe City.

Summer Scholars is one of the hundreds of programs that relied on Safe City and Grampsas funds to survive.

Now the program, which helps 1,200 children annually from 20 of Denver's elementary schools, has been hit doubly hard by the succession of state and city cuts.

In May 2002, Summer Scholars lost $250,000 of its funding, a quarter of the program's budget, when the legislature decided to cut the Tony Grampsas program.

Then Byrne discovered that Safe City no longer would be able to give the program any money.

Over the years Safe City had provided from $50,000 to $80,000 a year to Summer Scholars.

Following state cuts, the program reduced its services by 25 percent, leaving 300 children and three schools to fend for themselves.

Now city cuts are forcing Byrne to shave days from the program and cut teachers' pay.

"My biggest concern is how are we going to survive this," she said.

"A degree of preventative services are basically being wiped out because of these cuts."

For those former lawmakers who remember the Summer of Violence and the changes made, the loss of the programs is painful.

"It worries me mightily that we are not going to be funding the intervention that we clearly need," Wham said.

"We often are not really smart in looking at prevention and the long-term costs of not doing the prevention."

Roxane White, CEO of Urban Peak, which runs The Spot, says she's already starting to see the results.

"Young people don't get the family intervention and services they need anymore the first time they get in trouble with the law," White said. "And a downturn in the economy means more people are desperate.

"We are creating a climate similar to what we had in 1993."

The Spot, a teen hangout that's open six hours a day, five days a week, already has cut half of its staff because of the drop in grant money.

White said she hopes lawmakers haven't abandoned the state's youth.

"I don't think we've forgotten," she said. "I think we are in an economic crisis and need to be reminded of our priorities."

Norman Martin said he's reminded daily as he watches a repeat of what he saw happening before 1993's summer heat exploded into a wave of youth violence.

Sometimes, when he reads about a carjacking or hears of a drive-by, Martin begins to think of fishing trips and hikes, of coming out of retirement to do what he can to help.

"We lost a couple generations of kids to violence," he said. "That definitely bothered me. I felt back then that we would lose a whole lot more if we didn't try to do something."

But Martin said it would probably take another outbreak of violence like the summer of 1993 to kick-start him back into action.

"If it came like that again, I would step in and try to do something to help," he said. "It would bother me if I didn't."

crecenteb@RockyMountainNews.com or (303) 892-2811

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