Since 2002, Pico Youth & Family Center (PYFC) has empowered youth and young adults ages 8-24 in Santa Monica, Los Angeles County through professional and leadership training in Music, Film, Workforce Development, Technology, Creative Arts, Financial Literacy and Environmental Justice.
Our organizational culture, mission, vision and motto of Peace, Unity and Social Justice links us inextricably to the community we serve. Our Staff and Board of Directors is made up of community members and is the only youth-led organization in Santa Monica and West Los Angeles that is founded and run by people of color. For us, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) is woven into our fabric since our inception and leads us into the future.
We welcome young people from all walks of life, we serve youth from (including but not limited to) Black, Indigenous, Asian, Jewish, Pacific Islander and Latino communities.
We didn't intend to be part of this conversation, but we have been called to action. Our organization has been recklessly mentioned in several articles that appear to be malicious attempts to discredit Oscar de la Torre as both an individual and a social justice leader.
As members of the PYFC Board of Directors, we stand by Oscar de la Torre, recognizing his 26-year legacy of public service, advocacy for social and racial justice in Santa Monica. At the same time, we strongly repudiate the recent letter from former Santa Monica City Council members. This is the same group that, in 2015, voted to defund our youth center while continuing to fund and allocate over a million dollars annually to the Police Activities League (PAL) youth center, even as PAL faced numerous sexual abuse allegations affecting youth from Santa Monica and the Pico Neighborhood.
The letter from these former council members is misleading, inaccurate, and an orchestrated political attack. Each of the signatories was on the council when the PAL sexual abuse allegations surfaced. The former council’s failure to address PAL staff and volunteer supervision as well as ignoring alerts from former PAL employees that brought light to this issue have now cost the city at least $230 million in settlements to the victims of PAL Sexual Abuse. All of this has had a profound negative impact on the well-being of generations of Santa Monica youth who are now adults. Their letter is another effort to silence voices from the Pico Neighborhood, and we cannot stand by and allow this injustice to go unchallenged.
We know Oscar de la Torre as a diplomatic, hard-working, and fair leader. As the founder and former director of the Pico Youth & Family Center (PYFC), he recruited and mentored a staff of diverse races, faiths, genders, abilities, and orientations. From his early advocacy in 1990 as a high school student against hate speech at Santa Monica High School to his efforts in 1998 to reduce gang violence by building PYFC as a space for creativity and career development, Oscar has consistently supported and uplifted our community. His work includes helping organize Mothers for Justice, which passed legislation protecting single mothers and their children, developing green spaces like Gandara Park, securing resources for Edison Elementary, advocating for Black and Brown voting rights in the Pico Neighborhood through district elections, and establishing the Pico Neighborhood Library.
How does someone with such a strong record on racial justice come to be characterized as the “most racist” person in Santa Monica? What contributions have his naysayers made toward racial justice in the Pico Neighborhood?
In this important time, we must be critical of misinformation, deceit, and political mudslinging. As lifelong residents of Santa Monica and the Westside, we are deeply committed to our center’s mission of peace, unity, and social justice. We stand against bigotry in all its forms.
In Solidarity,
Alex Aldana, PYFC Executive Director
Ruben Pacheco, PYFC Board Chair
