This story is part of Reframing Crime Narratives, a 10-part series about public safety by The TRiiBE to create space for community conversation about crime in Chicago.
The series is supported in part by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Envisioning Justice grant by Illinois Humanities.
In Chicago, political interests and the mainstream media often circulate flawed narratives around the prevalence of “Black-on-Black” crime. Concerned residents, especially in divested communities on the South and West sides, are left grappling to find solutions to the violence that impacts their lives and families.
What gets overlooked is that there are many Black-founded and -led community organizations in Chicago that are often the first point of contact for folks in the aftermath of gun violence and other incidents of crimes. They provide a variety of essential services and programming that can also help prevent violence before it happens, but can be difficult to find.
For Tamar Manasseh, who leads Mothers And Men Against Senseless Killings (M.A.S.K.) in Auburn Gresham, it’s been challenging to manage the mental toll that comes with what she sees as an abundance of gun violence plaguing Black communities at a time when “no one cares” to solve it.
With the additional struggle of finding financial support for M.A.S.K.’s work, Manasseh recently questioned whether she should cease the group’s operations altogether after her grandson and other youth were shot at, breaking a longstanding peace treaty, as reported by Block Club Chicago.
She told The TRiiBE that she believes many see the issue of gun violence in Black communities as a problem they can ignore instead of “a can that they kick down the road.”
“I’ve been on that corner for three [mayoral] administrations. In the end, that is the go-to for all of them; they all go to more police,” Manasseh said. “‘We’re going to get more law enforcement involved, we’re going to bring in the state cops, we’re going to bring in the feds, we’re going to do this, do that, and guess what? It never works. People still die and so that’s where we are again. This is not a solution.”
Marquinn McDonald, co-founder of violence prevention group Watchguard Chicago, said that it can be sometimes difficult to sustain the work they do when donations and grants and other funding sources aren’t flowing to them. For Watchguard’s first two years of operation, much of its work was paid for out-of-pocket by McDonald and its early group of volunteers, he said.
Still, though, a sentiment shared by many Black community organizations who talked to The TRiiBE about their commitment to violence prevention is how important creating safer Black communities is to them.
“We really believe that we deserve better and we can do better for each other, and that’s not a hard message to put across,” said Martine Caverly, the executive director of Ujimaa Medics. “Black people do care, we’re doing really important work to address these needs and issues, and we are constantly encountering people who are highly motivated to create safer conditions, more loving conditions in our communities.”
The TRiiBE talked to the leaders of several Black community organizations for this story. Read their thoughts on violence prevention below.
1) Assata Lewis
Restorative Justice Coordinator for GoodKidsMadCity
Serves areas across the South and West sides, primarily based out of Woodlawn, Hyde Park and Englewood. Website
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Since age 13, Assata Lewis has been doing restorative justice organizing. She joined GoodKids MadCity (GKMC), an Englewood-based youth-led violence prevention organization, when she was 17 years old.
Today, as GKMC’s restorative justice coordinator, she sees first-hand the impact that violence prevention work and reliable programming for youth can have on Black communities. Much of that work, some focused on policy, is done with the input of those same communities, while remaining realistic about its results.
“I feel like a lot of times we’re faced with obstacles around people wanting quick results, but results that are long-term and sustainable, as far as facing violence interruption and prevention, [aren’t] quick. [They] take a bit more time and intentionality around pulling the right folks in,” Lewis said.
“For now, we’ve just kind of been focusing on building the relationships and partnerships, building with young people to gauge their interest and to really build more of a collective power around how they want to be seen, especially in a time where young people are at an interesting place in Chicago and an interesting place in life, as far as how they are showing up, how they’re being seen,” she added.
GoodKidsMadCity was originally established after the March For Our Lives gun control movement in 2018, which inspired many of GKMC’s founding members to highlight and organize around the ways that gun violence affects Black youth in Chicago daily.
Currently, the organization has several youth engagement programs, ones that feature basketball, arts, and teach health and first aid. Other programs provide youth with safe spaces to hang out and organize around policing and social justice.
Lewis said GKMC is also continuing to organize around an effort to see the passage of the Peace Book Ordinance, which would bring commissions and peacekeepers to communities most impacted by gang violence.
You can donate to GoodKidsMadCity online.
2) Martine Caverl
Executive Director of Ujimaa Medics
Serves areas across the South and West Sides. Website
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Martine Caverl leads Ujimaa Medics, an intergenerational collective of Black healthcare workers, activists, educators, healers and others committed to health justice in Chicago’s Black communities. What started as skill-sharing amongst friends and family mutually concerned for each other’s safety, and responding to a series of community tragedies, is now an organization that brings health services to South and West Side neighborhoods.
“What that looks like, concretely, is training bystanders to where we can respond to each other and stand in the gap where we are failed by the existing public health and safety systems,” Caverl said. “We will show up wherever we are asked to come —that can be a library, a block club party, a barber shop, a school, a church basement — to share skills so that we can better rely on each other and help to save each other’s lives.”
Some of the workshops they teach include gunshot wound first response, cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), seizure response, protester health and safety, and birth emergencies.
Caverl said many people aren’t sure what to do when tragedies occur. Bringing a varied cache of health skills means not having to wait until emergency services arrive, potentially saving more lives.
“So what we’re trying to do is take moments where people feel helpless and transform that into a moment where they feel powerful and they’re creating power for themselves,” Caverl said. “They’re also creating power for witnesses. They’re creating power for the folks who are injured and receiving help, and it’s transforming what people think about their community.”
You can donate to Ujimaa Medics online.
3) Diane Latiker
Founder of Kids Off The Block
Based out of the Roseland neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. Website
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More than 20 years ago, Diane Latiker started Kids Off The Block out of her home to serve as a safe space for the youth in her community, many of whom were her children’s friends. Now, the Roseland-based nonprofit provides people ages 10 to 24 with mentoring, tutoring, sports, training in leadership, community organizing and violence prevention, and mental health services. Youth also share COVID-19 vaccine information throughout the neighborhood and regularly lead vaccination efforts.
“We have been staying in our lane. I like to say that because we believe that whatever the young people that we serve and their families are going through, [it] is all connected to racial injustice, and we believe that unless they have the opportunities and resources they need, they can’t succeed in society because they’ve been labeled,” Latiker said.
When it comes to addressing the prevalence of violence in Black communities, Latiker said she believes it should be the people living in those areas spearheading those efforts; people Black youth are more likely to know and be comfortable receiving help from than those unfamiliar with the struggles they face.
“Young people have to trust you, respect you. You [have to] respect them also and trust them,” Latiker said. “I found out through 20 years that they also have to like you.”
You can donate to Kids Off The Block online.
4) Yolanda Fields
Executive Director of Breakthrough Chicago
Primarily serves the Garfield Park neighborhood on the West Side. Website
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Yolanda Fields started at Breakthrough as a volunteer in 2001, motivated to leave corporate America for more positive work in the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001. She now leads Breakthrough Chicago, a violence prevention organization that provides intervention, conflict mediation and restoration services to those ages 13 and up. Breakthrough also offers on-call support and crisis services to victims of violence and their families, and educational opportunities to kids ages 2 through 24.
Many of those providing violence prevention services to Garfield Park by volunteering with Breakthrough are from the neighborhood and familiar with its challenges. These individuals are first trained as “Peace Ambassadors” who then respond to instances of violence in the community, including shootings, stabbings, or other crimes.
“We’re there to offer services to surviving victims or victims’ families, and then really, to understand as much as possible what may have occurred so that we can reduce retaliation,” Fields said. “So that strategy really requires a staff that is hyper-local. I couldn’t hire somebody who grew up on another side of town to come in and expect that they would have the relationships or a reputation to be able to do the work.”
You can donate to Breakthrough Chicago online. There are also volunteer opportunities.
5) Jahmal Cole
Executive Director of My Block, My Hood, My City
Primarily serves the Chatham neighborhood on the South Side. Website
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My Block, My Hood, My City is a youth development organization founded in 2015 by social justice activist Jahmal Cole. After five years of volunteering at the Cook County Department of Corrections, he wanted to create an organization where youth could access opportunities that would divert them from crime and jail.
“It was inside the jail where talking with a lot of kids about where they’re from, that’s where I heard about their blocks in our neighborhoods. A lot of them hadn’t explored the city,” Cole said. “I thought that was tragic, and their whole worldview was shaped by the block of their neighborhood — what they wanted to be, what they thought they could become. I wanted to expose them to more options.”
Each month, Cole’s organization provides more than 150 Chatham youth with career, education, arts, culinary, and recreational activities through its Explorers Programs, which aims to expose young participants to places they might not have visited before, both within the city and beyond.
“You got to reach them way before you were talking about kids that got into a fight in fourth grade, and somebody held on to a grudge when they got in high school and shot him and killed him,” Cole said. “This [violence] isn’t something that is all random.”
You can donate to My Block, My Hood, My City online. There are also volunteer opportunities too
6) LaVonte Stewart
Executive Director of Lost Boyz Inc.
Serves parts of the South and West Sides, including South Shore, Humboldt Park, and Pilsen. Website.
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In 2009, South Shore native LaVonte Stewart founded the youth sports development organization, Lost Boyz Inc., hoping to use organized basketball, fast-pitch softball, baseball, and other afterschool activities to spread positivity. Stewart said his organization believes that organized activities can create safe spaces that protect against the effects of trauma and violence.
“The hardest part for us is continuing to convince folks to invest in us and provide us with the monetary resources that we need to continue to scale and build ourselves and our operations so that we can accommodate hiring, bringing those young people back to run things right, and creating succession plans so that one day I can exit,” Stewart said.
Lost Boyz Inc. was one of several violence prevention organizations that were promised financial support as part of the $15 million Violence Intervention Fund launched by the University of Chicago following the death of three UChicago students in 2021. Although, they did receive some money from the fund in December 2022, a one-year $375,000 grant, Stewart said, it’s unclear if the funding was a one-off grant or a renewable one, Block Club Chicago reported.
With funding issues often a common experience for Black organizations, Steward encourages people to support smaller organizations like Lost Boyz Inc. through donations and volunteering.
“People have to get involved,” Stewart said. “We need to support [Black organizations]. We need to prop them up. We need to make them anchors in our communities.”
You can donate to Lost Boyz Inc. online.
7) Tamar Manasseh
Founder and President of M.A.S.K. (Mothers And Men Against Senseless Killings)
Based in Englewood and Auburn Gresham on Chicago’s South Side. Website
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M.A.S.K., also known as Mothers and Men Against Senseless Killings, is an anti-violence organization started by Rabbi Tamar Manasseh to find safe ways of addressing the violence in her community. The group’s programming includes community dinners and events, gun safety classes, food pantries, toy and clothing drives, and more.
While strongly committed to doing what she can to create safer neighborhoods in Black communities, Manasseh has often felt frustrated when violence persists.
“I want speed bumps. I want to give people in the neighborhood a stipend because they help keep people safe because they are my eyes and ears when I’m not there. I want to help people who don’t have any employment. I want to be able to give them $200 a week or something like that because it’s better than nothing,” Manasseh said. “if we have to pay people to get engaged, we have to pay people to help keep the amount of violent crime down, then let’s do it.”
Manasseh said she believes it’s also important for community members to be present in their neighborhoods, to act as a deterrent to violent crime.
“It’s being seen. It’s sitting outside. It’s making sure kids in the neighborhood see you,” she added. “Nobody wants to shoot anybody in front of somebody’s mother.”
You can donate to M.A.S.K. online.
8) Pastor Corey Brooks
Founder of Project H.O.O.D.
Based in the Woodlawn neighborhood on the South Side. Website
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Project H.O.O.D. (Helping Others Obtain Destiny) works to address violence through educational resources, mentorship programs, job training programs, community development initiatives, affordable housing projects, health and wellness resources, and more. Founded by Pastor Corey Brooks of New Beginnings Church in 2012, Project H.O.O.D. also provides community members with trauma counseling for families who are victims of violence, with an emphasis on helping youth.
Brook’s organization takes a targeted approach to its violence prevention through conflict resolution training, events aimed at unifying the community, and collaborations with local law enforcement and other partners.
“We have a real strong core group of 25 full-time workers who are from the area; most of them, if not all of them, participated at one time or another, in gang activities and gang life, and we hired them and gave them conflict resolution skills, mediation skills, violence prevention skills, and we used them to help us to recruit in our neighborhood,” Brooks said.
Part of Brook’s commitment to anti-violence is in response to the negative narratives projected onto Woodlawn. Brooks can still recall a large Chicago newspaper deeming Woodlawn the city’s most dangerous community in 2014. That inspired him and others to address the problem head-on.
“The benefit of having Project H.O.O.D. in the neighborhood, as opposed to someone coming from outside of the neighborhood, is that we’ve been able to garner the trust of people in the neighborhood, and employ people from the neighborhood who help us to communicate about the programs and communicate the vision and the mission of project hood, and because of that, it’s made us really successful,” he explained.
On the Project H.O.O.D. website, you can donate, and find volunteering and employment opportunities.
9) Marquinn McDonald
Co-founder of Watchguard Chicago
Based in Bronzeville on the city’s South Side, serving Kenwood, Woodlawn, Hyde Park, South Shore, West Garfield Park, Austin, and Roseland. Website
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Watchguard Chicago is a violence prevention and community patrol organization founded by South Side native Marquinn McDonald in 2017. At the time, he said, there were frequent news reports of Black women either being harmed or going missing.
In response, the group began patrolling the neighborhood, becoming more active in 2020 after the summer protests following the murder of George Floyd, protecting local Black businesses from looting and de-escalating tensions. Today, Watchguard has community engagement programming, including town hall meetings, as well as mentorship and mental health programs for youth.
“We need to put pressure on our political leaders, on those that we have put inside these offices. We need to [do that], but in my humble opinion, the village still needs to take care of the village,” McDonald said.
“We can no longer afford to be divided, to fight over frivolous or petty things. [We can] no longer afford to be tricked by those who mean to do us harm,” he added.
McDonald said the group’s impact can be seen in the youth who initially come to their organization involved in gang activity, but through the Watchguard programming and community, are motivated to go to college or pursue professional careers.
One of McDonald’s mentees, who at one time was involved in gang activity and expressed a disinterest in school, eventually went to college, took up tattooing and appeared on the reality TV show “Black Ink Crew: Chicago.”
“He’s an incredible artist, to the point where he became a tattoo artist, and then all of a sudden, he became a local celebrity on a TV show called ‘Black Ink Chicago,’” McDonald said. “Now he’s in Virginia learning how to be a pilot, and he’s in flight school, still doing tattooing.”
You can support Watchguard Chicago by donating online.
10) Curtis Peace
Director of Prevention Services at BUILD Chicago
Headquartered in Austin and Humboldt Park. Website
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With its 1969 founding making it one of Chicago’s longest-running Black-led community organizations, BUILD Chicago works to make the West Side safer through conflict mediation, violence interruption, and engaging youth at risk of becoming involved in gang activity. BUILD Chicago partners with schools in Austin, Humboldt Park, and Garfield Park to provide these youth with trauma-informed support.
BUILD’s intervention specialists also work to diffuse conflicts and build trust with youth through recreational and athletic activities, tutoring, counseling, substance abuse treatment, and job training.
Curtis Peace believes providing these services is important as families and their needs change over time.
“What BUILD provides is sort of that sense of family and community, and not that we can supplement everything that’s not happening in the household, but we have built this to be a community hub for you to come in to enjoy,” Peace said. “For staff who work here, they are trained to work proactively with them in engaging ways.”
BUILD has several other programs and services aimed at reducing violence, including its family support services and truancy home visits, youth sports league, in-school and out-of-school gang avoidance sessions, community violence response team, and juvenile justice programming.
“We understand through positive youth development that we want to allow students, and we want to empower them, to use their voice and for them to be engaged and involved,” Peace said. “These are our next leaders that we are working with, our young people, so we really want them to thrive.”
You can donate to BUILD Chicago online. There are also volunteering opportunities.
11) Jacqulyn Hamilton
Director of Wellness, Culture, and Action at the Chicago Freedom School
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A youth-involved social justice organization inspired by the 1964 Freedom Summer movement, the Chicago Freedom School strives to promote abolition, transformative healing justice, and anti-oppression racial justice in Chicago’s Black communities.
Part of it’s mission is to reduce violence and create safer Black communities through youth programs, organizing, workshops and trainings. Its Freedom Fellowship teaches Black and brown youth, ages 14 to 17, leadership and community organizing skills.
At the Chicago Freedom School, “young people have opportunities to build organizing skills that they can use inside of the organization or they can use out in the world. We are really excited about young people being able to sort of take what they learn, and also take how they are learning, with them and to be able to build in movement spaces, particularly in Black and brown neighborhoods throughout Chicago,” said Jacqulyn Hamilton, the school’s director of Wellness Culture and Action.
“So our work is very much about countering violence — both interpersonal violence by creating community, but also countering systemic violence — because we know that oftentimes interpersonal violence, at the root of it, are systemic injustices and systemic oppression that create those conditions.”
For the Chicago Freedom School, and Hamilton by extension, addressing the root causes of violence means paying its organizers a fair wage, remembering critical literacy and critical analysis in their programming, being civically engaged, building partnerships with youth, and teaching ways of dismantling systems of oppression,
You learn how to donate to the Chicago Freedom School online
12) Tamisha Ballenger
Development Director of the Firehouse Community Arts Center
Based in North Lawndale. Website.
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Initially founded in 2003 by Pastor Phil Jackson as a Saturday night hip-hop church service in North Lawndale, the Firehouse Community Arts Center has grown into a larger organization that aims to reduce violence by providing youth and young adults with arts education and opportunities. Jackson wanted to start an organization that could connect young people with arts, which he believed could successfully prevent community violence.
Named for the 100-year-old firehouse Jackson and several of his partners purchased in 2007 as the organization’s headquarters, the Firehouse Community Arts Center’s violence prevention work comes in the form of its Spark Arts program. In it, youth can access arts training, social-emotional development and mentorship, as well as learn dance, technology, culinary and visual arts, audio engineering, fashion and video production.
“All of our programs are trauma-informed, and so we make sure that we create our curriculum, and the structure of our programming is based on the trauma that we see that our community and youth face on a daily basis,” said Tamisha Ballenger, the organization’s development director. She used to attend Jackson’s hip-hop church with her family when she was younger.
Dispelling the long-persisting negative perceptions of North Lawndale is partly why the Firehouse does its work, Ballenger said.
“We do have hidden, golden treasures here in the community,” Ballenger said. “I think that’s our main push there is to show that with the unity of our youth, our young adults and our programs, then we’re able to really show the unity and growth of North Lawndale.”
On the Firehouse website, you can donate or express an interest in getting involved.
13) Cobe Williams
Director of Cure Violence Global United States
Based in Chicago, also operates throughout the U.S. and internationally. Website.
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Many of South Side native Cobe Williams’ reasons for founding Cure Violence Global, an international violence prevention organization based in Chicago, were inspired by his difficult upbringing. He was raised by his grandparents after his father, who was later killed, went to prison, and his mother suffered from a drug addiction. Those experiences, plus spending his own time in prison, informed his beliefs on how violence should be addressed. After leaving prison and seeing how violence in Black communities is frequently covered on the local news, Williams was inspired to do something about it.
Although Williams’ violence prevention work has seen different incarnations over the years, he now works as director of Cure Violence Global, which aims to reduce violence by detection and interruption, providing those most at risk of engaging in violence with through social services and local outreach workers, community engagement and more.
To make their work more effective, Williams limits judgment and tries to meet people where they are. He also hires workers from the communities they’re based in and leads with the idea that redemption and second chances are possible for everyone.
“We understand people make choices, but we don’t point fingers like, ‘you did this or you did that. Why did you do this and do that?’ We understand these brothers and sisters come from broken homes, and some of them ain’t got nobody,” Williams said. “That’s really what made me buy into that, and like I say, it’s just really building relationships and getting to know them.”
Having a regular presence in the community is also important, Williams believes.
You can donate to Cure Violence Global online.
