For Urban Grief, mission to heal never ends
■ Contact columnist Chris Churchill at 518454-5442 or email cchurchill@timesunion.com
Thursday evening, a crowd gathered in Troy’s Riverfront Park for a vigil marking the killing of Donnovan Clayton, an 18-year-old hit by a bullet as he walked on Sixth Avenue toward his home. The event was one part memorial service, with prayer, spiritual songs, grieving family and testimonies to Clayton. But it was also an exhortation that included pleas for the violence in this region’s poorest neighborhoods to end.
“Stop Shooting!” yelled Lisa Good, 55, her chanted words echoed by the crowd. “Stop the Violence! No More Shootings! No More Killings! Choose Life! Not Death! Choose Books! Not Guns!”
With the Capital Region experiencing a terrifying spike in gun violence, have those words ever felt more urgent? In Albany alone, 18 people were shot in the one-week span that ended Sunday. Two died, including a 24-year-old shot Sunday morning at the corner of North
Lake Avenue and First Street.
“People are hurting,” Good said. “There are lives that have been forever changed.”
Good is the founder and executive director of Urban Grief, an unusual nonprofit that steps in once violence has occurred. The Albany-based group tries to help grieving families through their trauma, recognizing that survivors of gun violence often have nowhere to turn for help. Frequently, their wounds are left undressed.
Without Good, there wouldn’t have been a vigil for Clayton. She organized the gathering, believing that the death of the teenager, set to graduate from Troy High School this month, needed to be publicly acknowledged — that the terrible end of his life and the grief of his family shouldn’t be ignored, dismissed or forgotten.
Police say Donnovan Clayton simply was at the wrong place at the wrong time; the deadly bullet apparently wasn’t meant for him. Clayton was a good kid, the primary caretaker of his sick mother, and a sympathetic victim in the eyes of the media and the public.
But Good doesn’t deal in the world of “good victims” and “bad victims.” Urban Grief doesn’t judge what got somebody killed or what he might have been involved in beforehand. In its eyes, a troubled victim is still a victim.
That idea will be difficult for many to accept, I imagine. We often prefer to see the world without shades of gray. We may think some victims of gun violence received what was coming to them, without thinking about what got them there.
But Good notes that the young men involved in the violence of the streets are themselves products of trauma. They were children who grew big against a backdrop of gunfire and violence. They are the result of their environment, shaped by levels of stress, fear and anxiety that no child should know.
“No child is born to be a shooter,” Good said when we talked on Monday. “No child is born to be killed.”
And even if someone is a quote-unquote “bad victim,” Good said, the family still grieves and needs help just the same. A mother has still lost her son. A child may have lost his father, a wound that, if left to fester, could contribute to the violence of the next generation. On and on the cycle rolls.
Good, an Albany native, knows that violence firsthand. Her own cousin was murdered when she was 17. She saw the grief of her family, and how its members had nobody to help them with their enduring pain.
From those roots, Urban Grief was born. Now operating under the Trinity Alliance umbrella and funded in part by a state grant, Good’s group has three paid staffers and two interns. Armed with a masters in social work from the University at Albany, Good wants to help her city and region heal.
As Good noted, it’s important to remember that the effects of a killing last long after the cameras are gone and the attention has faded. A bullet, in a sense, is like a boulder dropped into a pond. Its ramifications ripple outward, affecting even the distant corners of its neighborhood.
Gun violence has economic effects, Good said, making it less likely that businesses will come to poor neighborhoods. It causes retreat called disinvestment, leading to more boarded-up homes and adding to the general feeling of despair. It causes pain for the families of victims, of course, and fear for those living amidst the gunfire.
Gun violence is the fruit of long-term systemic racism and all the problems affecting poor neighborhoods, Good said. But the cruel irony is that it also makes those problems worse, contributing with time to even more violence. The circle remains unbroken.