Senators hear ‘powerful voices’ on gun violence
NEW HAVEN — U.S. Sens. Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy, both D-Conn., came to New Haven Friday to speak with local residents involved in battling gun violence, seeking counsel as Congress considers including $5 billion in the Build Back Better Act to help address the issue across the nation.
“What we could do if we had billions of dollars to double, triple, quadruple the size of community intervention programs?” Murphy asked as he opened the discussion. “This is an opportunity to lift up programs that work.”
Local leaders described ways in which the funding would allow them to buttress their efforts to aid young people and families touched by violence.
With more money, they said, they could hire more staffers and create more sustainable workloads; expand educational, cultural and professional opportunities for young people; assist residents in wrestling with trauma and building skills to better their lives; and help heal the series of wounds that allow violence to fester in the community.
Leonard Jahad, executive director of the Connecticut Violence Intervention Program, said, among other possibilities, added funding would allow him to raise salaries, allowing his staffers to lead balanced lives, and hire more people.
The organization oversees street outreach workers who intervene after shootings in New Haven and Hamden, speaking with those involved and their families, seeking to help them in a time of need, mediate disputes and ward off potential retaliation, as well as offering youth programs. The job is all-encompassing, Jahad said — shootings can happen at any time.
“What we do is not magic,” said Jahad. “We’re committed, we’re consistent, we’re courageous . ... It’s just relationship-building capacities that are at the root of what we do.”
But, even as they remain on call at all hours, outreach workers are paid approximately $35,000, Jahad said — little enough that most hold second jobs. His salary is low enough that it would be difficult to hire a successor to run the program, he noted.
The organization currently has six workers, but could use double that, he said. They have one office, on Ashmun Street; violence occurs across the area. He could use staffers with specialized skills to aid with trauma, schooling and employment, he said.
Chaz Carmon, president of Ice the Beef, said the organization works with young people in New Haven, Waterbury and, in the near future, Middlesex County. Despite that, they’ve never received outside funding, he said; he’s never been paid.
Carmon said he and a staff of volunteers band together and improvise as they strive to mentor young people, helping them pursue their passions in life, building decision-making, socioemotional and conflict management skills along the way.
Among a series of other efforts, Ice the Beef recently fostered a youth production of “Romeo and Juliet“with the Elm Shakespeare Co.; it holds marches and rallies and runs an annual basketball league. Carmon said the organization strives to meet young people and families where they are, helping with the needs at hand, from poverty to trauma to a lack of a vision for the future.
“Everything we do, every march we have, we focus on the kids — having kids come to the table and plan,” said Carmon. “Let’s hear from the students . ... Kids are getting shot; their friends are getting killed. What are they saying? How are they feeling inside?”
Manuel Camacho, youth president of Ice the Beef, spoke to the importance of stepping forward to open the eyes of young people to new possibilities. A Fair Haven native, he said he grew up exposed to the street life; it seemed like the only path available to him — “that was the reality.”
But Carmon, by noting his
“Violence prevention is a huge, huge thing. But human sustainability is the thing that creates prevention.”
Sean Reeves
talent as a speaker at a young age, had offered a vision of a different way forward, Camacho said. He called for other young people in the inner city to receive that sort of foundational support and vision of greater possibilities.
“It’s a realization that you come to, when someone tells you that they see something in you that you can’t see — your whole world begins to change,” said Camacho. “That’s the thing we need to foster in these children; that’s the thing that we need to speak into them.”
Camacho said many of his peers have their hearts hardened at a young age — in an inner-city environment, they “go almost their entire lives without really knowing what love is, because they’re told to be tough, they’re told to hide their emotions, they’re told to negate all feelings of weakness.”
“That becomes a reality to them — ‘I’m going to close myself off from any of this,’ ” said Camacho. “But the moment you show them what love is, and belief, and hope, you can change their entire reality. And it does.”
Sean Reeves and Marlene Miller-Pratt, both of whom had children killed in New Haven, called for funding to help people in the community build practical skills in adolescence and adulthood.
Reeves noted that some teenagers in the city struggle to read and write, floating through school as they wrestle with the trauma of their upbringing, and graduate without the ability to pursue a professional life.
Miller-Pratt, a science teacher at Career High School, said many of her students said they were in the streets to help themselves and their families survive, to help pay the water bill.
“Violence prevention is a huge, huge thing,” said Reeves. “But human sustainability is the thing that creates prevention.”
Jeremy Stein, executive director of CT Against Gun Violence, noted the importance of gathering data to help inform how antiviolence and support efforts are distributed in the community; Gwendolyn Busch-Williams, director of Youth and Recreation in New Haven, called for the senators to lessen the red tape surrounding federal funding; Harold Dembo, program manager of Project Longevity in Bridgeport, also spoke to staffing concerns — they have two employees, he said.
Blumenthal and Murphy thanked those in the room for their thoughts and opinions as the discussion concluded. The wisdom, they said, would aid in helping to persuade their colleagues to allow the funding to move forward.
“You have given us some really powerful voices to take with us,” said Blumenthal.