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March 30, 2007
A positive spin on tragedy
Montreal woman turns personal loss into a community benefit.
VERONIKA STEWART
Twenty years after Twinkle Rudberg's husband was murdered by a
teen when he tried to stop a mugging, she decided there was something
concrete she had to do to help youth in crisis. She was in Vancouver
recently and spoke to the Independent about her work.
"We were out one night in Montreal and we witnessed a purse
snatching," Rudberg explained in a recent interview with the
Independent. "Life is all about choices. We turned down
that street quite by accident."
The boy, who was only 14, had jumped out of a car full of older
boys, and was doing the mugging as a kind of initiation into their
gang. Rudberg said the money they stole was most likely for drugs.
When Rudberg's husband Dan tried to intervene, the boy stabbed and
killed him. He was later caught and put into youth detention.
Rudberg said she has never blamed the youth for the death of her
husband and, after researching the boy's past, she understood how
he ended up in that situation.
She said he'd run away from a home in Baltimore, where he'd been
virtually raised by a television set. In Montreal, he and his gang
of friends would come into town on Saturday nights to steal money
to buy LSD.
"He had no community back-up," Rudberg said. "I saw
that he was also a victim."
It was then that Rudberg said she started work related to violence
affecting youth, with most of her focus on television violence.
Eventually, she decided she needed a more proactive approach.
"I said, 'I'm going to be an angry activist. I've got to make
a choice here,' " she recalled. It was then that she got the
idea to start her organizations Leave Out Violence (LOVE). Six months
later, LOVE garnered the attention of a reporter and photographer
from the Toronto Sun – and a photojournalism project
was launched.
The program allows youth in crisis to tell their story through photographs
and writing. The work that they do is compiled into a newspaper
format and distrubuted nationally. "It's a safe place [for
youth to tell their stories]," Rudberg said.
Youth leaders take the newspaper and information on their programs
into classrooms all over Canada to let youth that are witnesses,
perpetrators or victims of violence know that they aren't alone.
"It's youth-to-youth learning," Rudberg explained. "Our
kids are the embedded reporters in youth culture."
Rudberg said she sees herself as a spiritual vehicle for the work
that LOVE does. "I can't think of anything I'd rather be doing
than this," she said. "I made a choice to live life and
do something positive with what happened to me." She said this
is the message she wants to convey to troubled youth: that they
too can make the best of their circumstances.
Through her organization's direct contact with youth, Rudberg said
they gain a better understanding of the unique issues facing youth
today – which include cutting, eating disorders, bullying and
gang activity. Although Rudberg said these types of behaviors among
youth have always existed, she said they are more prevalent today.
"It's such a violent culture out there," she said.
Founded in 1993 in Montreal, LOVE has now spread to British Columbia,
Ontario, Nova Scotia, New York and Israel. The program is funded
in large part by a federal millennium grant, and also in part by
Jewish Federation, which helped bring the program to partner cities
in Israel. Rudberg said the organization has directly trained close
to 1,000 youth as leaders, but added that the program has come into
contact with many thousands more youth.
Rudberg said that although communities – including the Jewish
community – may feel they don't have a problem with youth violence,
all kids are affected on some level. "Every community holds
their issues very close to their chest," she asserted, "but
it's a mistake to do so."
Veronika Stewart is a Vancouver freelance writer.
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