Community leaders, new coordination center work toward addressing root causes of Chicago violence

Avanii Hazzard of Teamwork Englewood stood before dozens of leaders at a meeting in the neighborhood and implored them to dig deeper when they were discussing what the community needs in order to prevent violence.

“We’re missing a big part of the situation,” Hazzard said. “This is all reactive and none of it is proactive.”

The situation she was referring to was a fictional scenario of a teenaged mom who was angry that her baby’s father, just 17, wouldn’t provide for the child and instead was spending his money throwing himself a birthday party. The tension between the teen parents would lead to a fatal shooting, according to the the imagined setup.

The group of leaders Hazzard spoke to were from community organizations in and around Englewood, including libraries, the Chicago Housing Authority, Chicago police officers and other city and community departments, and were tasked with reading the scenario and discussing what the young people involved might need in terms of support.

There were three parts: “pre-incident” which explained the background of the situation, the “incident” when a shooting occurred, and “post-incident” or “aftermath” where they learned of the fallout and how people might be affected once the shooting happened.

The meeting was one of four community meetings organized by Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s administration and community leaders as part of the city’s Community Safety Coordination Center, which aims to use collaborative approaches learned during the COVID-19 pandemic to tackle Chicago’s violence problem at the neighborhood level.

The city’s new effort comes as Chicago saw a more-than-60% increase in homicides and shootings in the last two years. Most of the gun violence happened in communities of color that have always been less safe while struggling with neglect and systemic failures.

That neglect is what community leaders were addressing as they discussed what resources city neighborhoods need to prevent violence and to help communities heal from years of trauma. Teamwork Englewood is a non-profit group aiming to boost the quality of life for residents there.

“If we proactively looked at this situation, we knew what the outcomes and results would be right? But let’s take it a little step further,” Hazzard told the Englewood group. “When you think about the developmental brain of a 15-,16-, 17-year-old, when you think about the fact that the brain isn’t fully developed until 25, so we have 15-, 16-, 17-year-olds in these high stress situations. They are in a high trauma community, right? So proactively, what resources do we need?”

The 15-year-old mother in the scenario was a single parent, Hazard pointed out, wondering aloud whether anyone from her high school reached out to her when she dropped out of school or whether anyone reached out to the father to discuss how to make a co-parenting situation work.

Mental health was often brought up in the discussions, as well as a lack of funding and resources and sometimes a lack of coordination between existing community organizations that together can better provide for people struggling in the community.

‘Family and village’

The Englewood meeting was one of four the city organized in December. The other three meetings were in North Lawndale, South Lawndale and West Garfield Park, as the city focused on the four neighborhoods where people experience the most violence.

Since the Community Safety Coordination Center’s launch in August, city officials have met regularly with community leaders to talk about individual neighborhoods’ needs and resources. Those meetings helped shape the scenarios presented in the December meetings.

In each of those four gatherings, attendees were given statistics about the neighborhood beyond gun-violence data. That included where residents own their homes instead of rent, where libraries, schools, grocery stores and banks are located, as well as where drug overdoses and shootings were concentrated in each neighborhood. The city asked the University of Chicago’s Crime Lab to analyze each neighborhood and put together the data.

Those at the meetings were asked to keep the information in mind as they read through each scenario. And while each incident was fictional and focused on problems based on the neighborhood where the mock-up took place, discussions often led to real-life examples of shootings and how each shooting just adds to the collective trauma of neighborhood residents.

For Danielle Wallace, executive director of Kingdom Avenue Inc., an organization that connects people to resources to help children stay safe and on track in school, the Englewood scenario hit home.

Wallace was a teenage mom and has seen some of the students she works with go through similar situations.

“What I needed then and the issue that still persists is kind of universal connection, like a hub, a resource center that houses wraparound services,” Wallace said. “Services that address family and village.”

While she believes it’s a big deal that the city is organizing to address violence prevention, Wallace said solving neighborhood problems will be a heavy lift that needs policy that encourages healthy families and neighborhoods as well as the needs people on the ground.

“My hope is just that we get to the work, we get to the doing,” Wallace said, “and allow the people who know the work best to lead the way.”

More discussions

The South Lawndale talk was about domestic violence that led to a fictional shooting at a park in the middle of the day when children were nearby. Leaders discussed what resources existed to help the mother who was hospitalized, the children who were living with their grandparents and what resources could have prevented the mother to stay in a relationship where she relied on the income of her children’s father who sold drugs.

But in the shooting and the aftermath discussions, people moved to the bigger picture needs of community and talked about how children, who have in real life heard gunshots while playing outside or from their house, need mental health resources because they’ve become numb to the violence they’re growing up with.

In the North Lawndale scenario, a teenage boy was caring for his disabled mother, helping with the care of his younger siblings and working to help pay bills. In this high-stress situation, a classmate was imagined to bully him, sparking a fight that ended in a shooting. Paralyzed, the teenager could no longer work to continue to support the family.

Community members who took part in that meeting said the boy should have never had that much responsibility to begin with, and access to an at-home caregiver would have helped. But that’s the reality of some families in Chicago, some said. People also discussed how other teenagers in the crowd who gathered to watch the fight might need support as well, and how even the shooter might have been numbed to the area’s violence to begin with.

In West Garfield Park’s scenario, the shooting happened after a fight between a veteran experiencing homelessness and his drug dealer. Lightfoot briefly attended the beginning of that talk, the final meeting in the weeklong series.

Lightfoot said historically, Chicago has seen spikes then drops in violence over the years.

“And what we have historically done in responding to these spikes is throw massive amounts of police force at it,” she said. “We have changed the laws, we have changed the sentencing. We have swept people off the streets, locked them up and thrown them away. But we never ever solve the problem.”

Lightfoot looked back to her first summer as mayor, when her administration launched the Pulaski Corridor Policy. Pulaski Road was a main corridor for open air drug markets, where people were seen dealing drugs on most of its corners, Lightfoot said.

“We learned a lot, but we didn’t make a significant difference,” she said, adding leaders knew they had to do something different and better.

“I would venture to say over the last 10 years when you account for city, state, county and federal resources, we’ve probably spent 2 billion plus dollars on policing,” Lightfoot said “But nobody feels safer. We haven’t changed the quality of life anyway, and certainly not here.”

Expanding response

The city plans to take what they learn as they address violence at West Garfield Park and use those lessons to prevent violence in other neighborhoods across Chicago, Lightfoot said.

Those lessons include treating drug addiction as a deep-rooted problem in West Garfield Park and supporting organizations already in the community focused on addiction-related issues, Lightfoot said.

“The goal here for us from the city side is to really understand how community responds, what the resources are in any given community, and how we can be more responsive to make sure that we’re connecting the dots for them,” the mayor said, “and to understand where both the gaps are, but also the opportunities.”

Lightfoot said the city will continue to build the new center and bring together community organizers to work toward prevention and solutions on the ground. She also wants to ensure the city is more coordinated in its response to violence.

Asked whether she expects funding for prevention and addressing root causes to match police funding, Lightfoot said she expects what her administration has already done — “which is that we’re significantly increasing the amount of funding that’s going into communities,” she said. The city’s fiscal year 2022 budget included $1.2 billion in funding toward communities, she said.

“And the $1.2 billion is probably the single largest investment in communities that the city has ever seen in its history,” Lightfoot said.

The city identified $400 million in new funding through 2024 going toward violence intervention, affordable housing and homelessness support, family and youth programs, health and wellness programs, community development and park infrastructure and small business support. The new money is a combination of federal funding for pandemic relief through the American Rescue Plan Act passed in March, corporate funds and bond funding.

“The disinvestment that’s occurred in these communities has happened over decades upon decades,” said Tamara Mahal, chief coordination officer at the Community Safety Coordination Center. “We’re not going to fix that in a year. We understand that. But what we do think we can do is utilize those funds to really write the playbook to better understand how funding has to be allocated in the future.”

City leaders plan to take the information and feedback they got from each of the meetings, identify community needs and offer support to community organizations based on what they learned in the discussions, Mahal said.

City residents will see new anti-violence campaign marketing, infrastructure repairs and the city addressing vacant, city-owned lots identified by the University of Chicago data, Mahal said. The city will also find ways to support individual communities based on what neighborhood leaders say they need, she added.

“We need to understand where we have to empower where we have to support and of course, where it’s our role to own that issue too,” Mahal said. “And so for us, it’s about identifying each one of those things with each community.”

Theodore J. Crawford, executive director of the organization Rite to Wellness, which is part of the effort, said both immediate community work and the longer term solutions that require the city’s support are necessary.

Crawford has been working to address community violence for 30 years. After attending the West Garfield Park meeting, he said he expects existing community organizations to work together to support residents. He also said the city’s commitment to help organizations already addressing root causes of violence already feels more intentional and seems to be coming with a greater sense of urgency.

“I do think this is a different type of investment that I haven’t been seeing coming out of city government probably since Harold Washington,” Crawford said of the city’s CSCC initiative. “But again, the proof is gonna be in the pudding.”