Adrift in a churning tide: life after homicide, Part 1

Part 1

Very suddenly she had become like a lifeless stick adrift in a churning tide, with no will of her own. That's what it sounds like as Rose Holman describes the days after her son Lewis was shot and killed in Oakland in April of 2012. Lewis was a passenger in a car near Mills College in East Oakland. The driver was shot, too, but survived. Lewis died at the scene. It happened at 4:30 p.m.

When she emerged from that tide, things got even worse. "I was in an uncontrollable rage," says Holman, in a voice today full of kindness and calm.

Even in Oakland, you wouldn't have heard much about the killing of Lewis Holman. The 21-year-old carpenter was shot to death during the most murderous year Oakland had seen since the 2006. Lewis was not wealthy or white. He was not a child. He was a young, black man in East Oakland, and so, in some objective ways, the most unspectacular of victims of the city's long-standing troubles with the gun. Such murders garner little public attention. 

There was a handful of news items. One said there were many witnesses to the killing of Lewis, but more than a year later the police have no real leads. No one would talk. 

Like most survivors of the killed, his mother was offered little help from the city. Her loving daughters jumped in to try to guide her, but what did they know, really, about what to do when you are thrust into the strange world of homicide and its aftermath? Suddenly, there are police to deal with for perhaps the first time in your life. There are coroners and morticians and preachers and a whole world to notify and everything costs money and you had no idea this was coming. And you have lost not just your son or brother but, for a time, your mind, your heart. 

Who would step in to help her? -coming up in Pt 2 ("She's Gonna Help You Get Through It")


                                      -J. O'Brien
                                       Author of Until You Bleed: The Caheri Gutierrez Story,
                                   a Kindle Single, available at Amazon for $0.99
                                   "Captivating" - Visión Hispana
                                   "Gutierrez is an unforgettable subject" - San Francisco Chronicle
                                   Soon to be an audiobook from Audible.com

New Oakland Unite (formerly Measure Y) Violence Prevention Evaluation Released

Resource Development Associates of Oakland has issued its most recent evaluation of the effectiveness of Oakland's civilian violence prevention programs funded by Measure Y, now housed under the city office known as Oakland Unite. Spending money on these programs can be controversial. Some think all crime-fighting money should go toward a bigger and better OPD. Some like to say, "Well, you can't arrest your way out of our problems." Some say both a community-based violence prevention approach and a stronger police force are needed.

Prevention can be difficult to quantify. You can't necessarily count up the things that didn't happen, the retaliatory shootings that were prevented by Caught in the Crossfire, a hospital-based intervention program that works with young people wounded in the city's violence, or the turf group wars that didn't flare up because of the intervention of the Oakland Unite Street Outreach teams, which walk the city's most dangerous streets at the most dangerous hours trying to keep the peace.

One thing is for sure, civilian violence prevention is cheaper than more police. In the past, I've called it Oakland's Moneyball approach to public safety. 

Anyway, it's all in the evaluation's summary, posted on Oakland Unite's web site, right here. I'll give it a closer look and write more about its findings if I can get over this feeling that no one cares if I do or not.

Sound of the Oakland Front Lines

Prior speakers at Oakland City Councilmember Libby Schaaf's valuable Safe Oakland series had tended to be academics advancing their theories and brands; I had skipped their appearances. It's an attitude problem I have, but I admit that I'm a snob for the voice of the streets. For the information and tone that emanates from the front lines of the violence. It's a voice that's sharp, confident, sometimes exasperated but never hopeless. It has a sound that cuts through the echo of self-interest and fear you so often hear around her.

So when I saw that one of the speakers this week was a member of Kevin Grant's Measure Y Street Outreach Team, and that another was the leader of Youth Alive's Caught in the Crossfire program, I figured I could learn something about Oakland. So I joined the hundred or so other mostly middle-aged, extremely white people from the hilly part of Schaaf's council district (I actually live in Noel Gallo's nearby district, but I have no idea what he's doing) who, to their credit, had made the trek up to Holy Names University on a soft May evening.
 

For two hours that night, tucked away in the hills in seeming safety, in the well-built but sterile performance center at Holy Names, two toilers on the front-lines of Oakland's violence spoke with utter frankness about their work, their successes and failures, about what they see and hear on the streets of Oakland and in the hospital rooms of the wounded at Highland and, nowadays, Children's.

They spoke, each for about 20 minutes (before participating in a long panel discussion), without notes, without much self-consciousness, without agendas of self-promotion or even necessarily of promoting their own programs. (Although I admit that I might be a little naive...) They were the farthest things from politicians you could find at this kind of public event, and so you could learn things from them that you could trust. I'll write about Kyndra Simmons of Caught in the Crossfire next, but first, here's what I got from Akil Truso of the Measure Y team.

I'd seen Kevin Grant, the leader of Oakland's Street Outreach program speak many times (I've written a ton about Grant. Here's something here: No Escape, No Surrender), but tonight the team was represented by Truso, in the oversized white t-shirts he and Grant favor, this one advertising Grant's Way Out program. (See my write up of its introduction last year: In Oakland, a New Way Out?)

Truso is leader of the seven-man team that walks the streets of West Oakland on the statistically most dangerous nights of the week -- Thursday, Friday and Saturday -- at the statistically most dangerous hours of the night, in a non-violent effort to keep the peace, to douse any possible sparks of violence, to engage the young people they find on the corners, to offer them alternatives.

Here's the kind of thing you learn from listening to guys like Truso:

Frisk the Bushes

An official "stop and frisk" policy in Oakland probably won't find very many illegal guns, because most guys hide their guns around the neighborhood, in bushes, under houses. They don't necessarily carry them with them in cars. Until, of course, they're needed. (At-large Councilmember Rebecca Kaplan, who participated in the panel discussion after the talks, made the good point that with 200 fewer cops than we are supposed to have, OPD really doesn't have the manpower to be stopping and frisking people for rather vague reasons, anyway.)

Turf War

Truso said there's a war going on right now between groups in the McClymonds area and the Acorn, which to me had always meant pretty much the same thing. They are adjacent and kind-of flow into and out of each other. I always think of McClymonds High School as being pretty much in the Acorn. It was on the campus of McClymonds that my friend Marilyn Harris' son was killed in August of 2000. She's lives and is a manager in the Acorn development. (I've written quite a bit about Miss Marilyn, too, if you're interested.) Just goes to show you how geographically specific Oakland's turf groups can get. (Me on the turf groups: A Violent Thing.)

Heroin Demographics

A high percentage of customers coming to San Pablo Ave to purchase heroin are white. One of them felt cheated and brought a bunch of buddies back with him to confront his dealer. He got his money back. In terms of racism, said Truso, down there, I don't really see much discriminating going on. 

Paying for Help

Truso has come up with a new approach the Measure Y teams are using to try to change things on the street. For years they have been offering gang members help finding jobs, but there are so few jobs, and they're not great jobs, and so lately the team has been, in a sense, hiring some of the gang members to work with them, paying gang leaders stipends to help them reach out to other gang leaders, to act as ambassadors in the gang world, to draw others into the conversation about alternatives to violence and the Game.

Like Measure Y's Kevin Grant -- like Truso, as well -- many of the outreach team members grew up in the neighborhoods where they now work. Like Grant and Truso, many of them got in trouble in those neighborhoods. And like these two men, some of them served serious time for their crimes.

Truso said he was in and out of prison for 18 years. Grant spent 17 years in 11 different federal penitentiaries. Unlike some who go through the corrections system, at some point, both experienced a profound change, if not in who the were, then in the direction in which they wanted to take their lives. On Wednesday night, Truso searched for an answer to what caused the change in him, and finally said it was the change he'd seen in the streets, the chaos that had led to so many wounded and killed children in Oakland. That was too much for him. He'd gotten the opportunity to work for change in the city and had grasped it.

He said that many of the guys he runs into through his work, the ones he's trying to keep calm and peaceful, still see him as he was in the old days, still call him by his nickname from back then, which I noticed he declined to share with the audience; it was absolutely not the person he was representing tonight, and so irrelevant to us.

But it is that old identity that allows the guys on the streets to trust Truso, to hear his new message in a way they might not hear it from anyone else, from a cop, or a preacher or a professor of criminology. When Grant or Truso give them the "guns down" message, when they offer stipends to help the outreach team communicate with other gang leaders, these are acts no one else could credibly engage in, and the conversations that result are ones no one else could generate. 

Hope against Hope

"I truly believe there's an answer," said Truso, pleading for city-wide engagement, "but it's gonna take everybody. If we don't jump right in, the violence is going to get worse and worse."

When an audience member said every member of her family had been a victim of crime in Oakland, and that after 56 years living here, she was feeling hopeless, Truso said if you're feeling hopeless, look at me, there's a miracle sitting right up here in front of this room.

by James O'Brien
twitter @icecityalmanac
author of Until You Bleed: The Caheri Gutierrez Story, a Kindle Single, available at Amazon ($0.99)
"Captivating" -Vision Hispana 
"Gutierrez is an unforgettable subject" -San Francisco Chronicle

Read about today's killings, then forget

Two killings this weekend in Oakland. (After two late last week following the Warriors' final game.) But it was the bare bit of information in today's news about yesterday's killings that struck me. As we learn more, it may change, but for now, these seem to be precisely the kinds of killings we hear about, then ignore. They occurred, with a depressing balance, in precisely the places we expect them to occur. One in Deep East Oakland, at 92nd and International, one on West Street in West Oakland. 

There's no description yet of the West Oakland victim, but the East Oakland victim is described as a 27-year-old male, shot "shortly after 4:30 a.m." 27. Don't know yet if he was African American, but for sure his age of death lands him right in, as I have referred to it in the past, the wheelhouse of urban murder. That is, most homicide victims in Oakland are African-American men between the ages of 17 and 39. And ultimately, their murders are shrugged off by the majority of the city. 

I remember being in the ICU with the family of Daryl Starks back at Christmastime 2010. Starks had been shot on a Friday night at 78th and Bancroft, a popular area in Oakland to get shot. Starks was 26, a dangerous age for a man in Oakland. He was in a coma. I remember sitting in the Highland waiting room (see the wonderful documentary about the Highland waiting room, called The Waiting Room) talking to his younger sister, 16, who herself had been shot the year before, in a park at Seminary and E. 14th, another hotspot in the dangerous Deep. Her shooting had made the TV news, but I knew Daryl's wouldn't. The details would seem too common. 

Daryl was shot while driving home from the store, which if he had been white in Montclair, or if he had been, say, 16, his story might have gained some attention. But given his age, his race and the location of the shooting, there was I believe a tacit citywide conclusion that his death was run-of-the-mill for Oakland and that, if he did not necessarily deserve to get shot and die, then likely at least he had done something wrong to put himself in position to get shot and die. And whatever that wrong thing was, it was a type of wrong thing, a type of mistake different from any mistake we might have made in our lives, worse than any wrong thing we had ever done ourselves. It had led to his death. So while we might be mildly sorry for him and his family, we weren't going to nurture our sympathy or cultivate some outrage. We weren't going to march for peace because Daryl died, or petition the government for new gun laws, or write about his murder or think about it much. (Ultimately Daryl's death did get a little publicity, as his family agreed to donate his organs.)

2010 was a relatively sane year for homicides in Oakland. There were 10 fewer killings than in 2009. Not one single homicide victim that year was white. But Daryl, who died five days before Christmas, wouldn't be the last murder of the year.

These two as yet unnamed homicides from yesterday, May 19th, 2013, bring the year's number of killings to 39. Some have generated publicity and hand-wringing. Even arrests. What was the difference between those killings and these? Between those killings and the killing of Daryl Starks? Is one life worth more than another?

by James O'Brien
twitter @icecityalmanac
author of Until You Bleed: The Caheri Gutierrez Story, a Kindle Single, available at Amazon ($0.99)
"Captivating" -Vision Hispana 
"Gutierrez is an unforgettable subject" -San Francisco Chronicle

OPD Chief Jordan on a 4-year-old who witnessed his own mother's murder

The young boy's mother was killed on 54th near Shattuck, in North Oakland, on Wednesday, April 24th, 2013, around 8:45 p.m. Officers at the scene had to care for him. The Chief was there, and had this to say:

"This is one of the saddest situations, where you have a 4-year-old that basically witnessed someone getting killed," Jordan said. "That is a memory he is going to have in his mind for a very long time. I'm not sure how he is going to recover from that."

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/Loud-argument-before-mom-slain-in-Oakland-4463933.php#ixzz2RWwp6BDp
 

Ice City Almanac's Top Stories

From A Violent Thing: Inside an Oakland Gang Call-In 
All gunshot wounds in Oakland are brought to Highland. She tells them, calmly, that the worst case scenario if you end up at Highland is surviving. Surviving a gunshot wound is the worst thing that can happen. It only takes one bullet in the spine and you’re a quadriplegic. No movement, no sex, someone has to wipe your ass. No one comes to visit you because no one wants to see you like that. I become your only friend, she tells them. She approaches the sharply-dressed Participant, points over toward the baby. Is that your baby? Is that your queen holding the baby? He nods politely. He’s looking her in the eye, looking up at her. You want that baby to see you paralyzed, with tubes coming out of you, with a colostomy bag? Imagine that. This is not rhetorical, it’s a demand. Imagine it. This right here today, she tells them, this is a blessing. Because you are alive and free.

From 13: At the Funeral of Thirteen-Year-Old Jimon Clark
Just ahead of me in line at the funeral of Jimon Clark, the last of six homicides to occur in Oakland between August 18th and August 25th, a group of kids in their early teens has reached the coffin. They look like they are not quite sure what to do. In line, all but two of them have been fairly upbeat, nonchalant, possibly faking their cool, or possibly they have done this so many times that it feels about the same as standing in line at a taco truck. I want to think they are faking, that their hearts are beating faster than usual, that they are at least a little freaked to confront the dead body of their friend and schoolmate, that maybe they are hiding secret worries that his gunshot wounds are visible.  I want to think that for these baby-faced, rather slight, early teenage kids from Oakland, neither the day nor the event is routine.

From The Dark Urges: In the ICU with Daryl Starks' Family
Darryl Starks' little sister needs $20. She needs it for a new tattoo, one that will commemorate his death, which is imminent. Starks himself lies intubated and comatose in a narrow hospital bed, in ICU room #19, at the Alameda County Medical Center, a.k.a Highland Hospital. He lies under bright lights. His head is tilted back a little on the white pillow, skewed just slightly to his left, toward where his oxygen tube runs. His eyelids are not completely closed.  It’s Saturday night. Starks was shot on Friday evening, at 78th Avenue and Bancroft, while driving home from the store. He was hit once in the shoulder and once in the back of the head. Now an ICU nurse sits distractedly at a computer station just outside a picture window with a view onto Starks' unmoving body. Occasionally the nurse checks his iPhone.

From Imaginary Pain: At the Grim Geographical Nexus, with Kids

In the neighborhood where these kids live and go to school, shootings and homicides occur with a depressing regularity.  Five days ago a man and a teenager were shot right here on Foothill Boulevard.  Last summer, Jimon Clark was killed on nearby Bancroft.  He was 13.  A few days before Jimon was shot in the back, Melvin Murphy was stabbed to death in an apartment complex on Bancroft.  Derrick Jones was killed on Bancroft by police back in November.  Alvaro Ayala was a student at the same high school as Lovell.  He was killed almost one year ago to the day. And yet, somehow, at least superficially, they remain, like all teens, conventional: self-conscious, social, periodically oblivious, ignorant of or uninterested in decorum.  They do tend to cooperate with the instructions of the preachers, to clap when they are asked to, to stand when they are asked to.  They know when they are expected to say “Amen” or to answer in unison a question about Jesus or the perils of smoking pot. But they don’t take any of the pastor’s words seriously.  Hopefully that’s because they assume they will never kill anyone anyway.  No doubt, being kids, and despite today's evidence to the contrary, some think they will never die.  And they don't seem gloomy. Until it is time to see their schoolmate’s body.

From Against Nostalgia: After The Death of Raymen Justice
There is a note, handwritten in black, taped to the apartment door, discouraging visitors from knocking. It makes the point that the Justices will have nothing to give you, especially money, and don’t knock unless you have brought something for them.  Marilyn Harris, of course, brings, as always, the promise of help, hope, and healing. She always enters even the tensest, most somber, most fraught rooms with the confidence and even the joy of the gifts she brings. It’s 9:30 in the morning. There are maybe seven people in the small, dimly lit, disheveled apartment. Raymen’s sisters are here. On the day after the killing, Raymen’s brother, Rayven Jr., collapsed and was taken to the hospital. Rayven Jr is a composer and performer of sort-of hip hop love ballads. He seems to be talented and is no doubt a sensitive person. He is recuperating with the boys’ mother at her home in East Oakland. A family friend named Miracle is here. Two years ago her brother was taken from this very apartment building and murdered; his body was burned so severely that the police could not declare the death an official homicide. There is a Tupac poster on the wall. Over the couch there is a narrow, framed portrait in oils of Raymen’s father, Rayven, in his younger days in a suit and round hat with an upturned brim. It was, I believe, a certain favored style in Oakland in the early 80s. Rayven Sr is a slight man, gray-haired, a Vietnam vet, angry as hell, righteous about having raised his two sons on his own, about their potential and their good grades. Raymen had a 3.3 grade point average, he tells us several times. Rayven Sr is sitting next to me on a small sofa. He’s drinking coffee with cream and sugar. Man he is pissed. He gets up a number of times and leans over the coffee table and into people’s faces to declare his independence from any need of the money being offered him.

From The Big Event
That bullet that wounds or kills, it also ricochets. As the news spreads through a family, through the streets, it continues to wound or kill; if one person has been taken from us body and soul, a dozen more are lost to us in lasting bitterness, subversive grief, debilitating fear, and, in the case of a child growing up on streets lorded over by the gun, a way of life they learn from repeated violence and loss.

From (New) Code of the West
In genuine disbelief, I turned and walked back against the tide and stood across from the church entryway to watch, as more and more people staggered out. Soon I heard sirens but only gradually realized they were for us. Within twenty minutes there were dozens of cops from numerous forces -- OPD, CHP, Alameda Sheriffs, Parole, Corrections. Lots of collegiality between them. Hugs and handshaking and "Where you been lately?!?" There were guys in riot gear. That erie modern sight of helicopters hovering over you. Most of the cops had tear gas guns, but at one point a tall, white officer (I'd say 80 to 90% were white) took something that looked like a guitar case out of a van, snapped it open, pulled out a machine gun, clicked the cartridges in, slung it around his shoulders and headed up the street. He looked thrilled. I counted nearly a hundred cops in half a dozen picket lines across at least two streets.

Until You Bleed: The Caheri Gutierrez Story

Until You Bleed: The Caheri Gutierrez Story

This is the story of how it looks and feels when the bullet finds you. It’s the kind of story you encounter in violent neighborhoods across America. Only there's one big difference.

In old modeling photos, the face of Caheri Gutierrez confronts you with one of human history's miraculous hybrids, a sublime symbol of what we can accomplish, over centuries, if we work together: the big, dark, almond shaped meso-American eyes and wide, pre-Columbian cheekbones; the flared, triangular, European nose; the dark skin — burnt, Mexican; the full, downward, frowning mouth pure early 21st century Oakland, California, USA.

Gutierrez thought that face was her ticket to the future. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, came the bullet. Suddenly, on a cold night in November 2008, she found herself bleeding, choking, holding her face together with her hands, calculating her very chances of survival.

Caheri Gutierrez' inspiring struggle to heal herself and the city of Oakland is woven with courage, fear and defiance. In many ways, her personal story is much like the story of Oakland itself, a polyglot city decades in murderous decay, not quite so innocent as it wishes, but a victim nonetheless of the political flailing that comes of desperation and neglect. Like Gutierrez, Oakland is beautiful and wounded, unable to let go of its past and uncertain about its future.

Until You Bleed is a deeply researched, literate and brutally frank portrait of a city under the gun, and a young, wounded woman trying to change that.

Available as an Amazon Kindle Single, for $0.99.

Miss Marilyn

Recently someone asked me to write up a summary of the work of Oakland's Marilyn Washington Harris, whose son, Khadafy, was killed on the campus of McClymonds High School in West Oakland back in the summer of 2000. Marilyn is the founder and executive director of the Khadafy Washington Foundation for Non-Violence. I was asked to write about the background to the problem she addresses, the specific work she does, the impact she has on the community, how she is a leader, and finally to sum it all up. And to do it all briefly. I thought it turned out to be a nice, succinct testament about one of the finest, most courageous people I've ever met, so decided to post it here on the Almanac. First the summary, then the other four sections.

Marilyn Washington Harris aids Oakland's forgotten and its shunned. Since losing her only son to the gun in 2000, and finding no help available, she has dedicated her life to stepping into the immediate aftermath of homicides to provide help, hope and healing to stunned, angry, mourning families. Daily, she guides Oaklanders through the craziness, the hopelessness, and the business -- coroners, funerals, city offices, police -- of being a survivor. In 13 years, at homes, at crime scenes, at churches, chapels and funeral homes, she has aided thousands of families, making appointments and arrangements, accompanying them, protecting them from exploitation and beginning the healing process with patience, love and trust. A government clerk when her son was killed, she has become a vocal advocate for peace, a model of selfless service, an inspiration to a generation of violence prevention workers, and a healer of the city and its victims.

Background (of the problem Miss Marilyn addresses in her work)

For more than three decades now, Oakland has had one of the highest homicide rates in the nation. Police and programs exist for the prevention of violence, but very little has ever been done for the survivors of the killed who, lost and scarred, frightened, often friendless and poor, must continue to live and function in the community. When her son was killed in 2000, Marilyn Harris found that there was no one to guide loved ones through the great uncertainty, through the grim business so suddenly at hand in the wake of the violent death of a son, husband, daughter, wife. Suddenly, in a mental and emotional daze, there are police to deal with, coroners, city clerks, funeral arrangements, often with very limited funds. The opportunities for neglect and exploitation are many. Through the lonely, often bitter process, the anger, sadness and alienation of the survivors are only increased and solidified. To ignore their needs is to let their wounds fester. It is to risk returning them to the community utterly bereft and hopeless. To aid them, is to demonstrate that love and healing are still possible.

What She Does

Sometimes she gets a text, or a colleague calls. Often, the police call Marilyn Harris when there has been a homicide in Oakland. Sometimes neighbors of the killed call; they know it's time for Harris to do her work, as only she can. She steps into the bleakest environments, at crime scenes, in homes under a cloud of shocked mourning. She connects with the sufferers, demonstrates rare understanding in the face of anger, confusion, even hostility, casting a balance between compassion and necessity. She finds the right moment for the business at hand, then provides knowledge, will, and a clear mind. Harris knows the system, from cops to florists to morticians. She makes appointments at funeral homes, at the coroner's office, at victims' services. She meets you there, or drives you, assures you are cared for and not exploited. She scrapes and scrounges for funds if you need them, checks if you have taken your medications, if you need food or childcare. She is with you at the funeral, there for you as you return to life. For many, she becomes for a time the one person they know they can trust and believe in. They never forget it.

Her Impact

More than 1,000 people have been killed in Oakland since 2000, when Harris' son was murdered in West Oakland. Nearly all of the 1000-plus victims' families have been helped through their most excruciating days by the sure hand of Miss Marilyn, as Harris is known throughout Oakland. With a minimal staff and small budget, Harris has almost single-handedly aided thousands of Oaklanders. When her son was killed, there was no one to help the survivors; they were the forgotten people, often shunned even within their own communities. And they would remain bitter, sometimes bent on revenge. Now, instead of returning survivors of the killed to the world alone and lost, she returns people who have begun the process of healing. The impact of her work spreads far beyond the individuals she guides, far beyond the days and weeks after a homicide. Even the police rely on Harris to calm the roiling souls of survivors so they can do their investigative work. To grieving families, she is a vivid reminder that the whole world is not against you. To anyone who knows her, she is a symbol of the possibility of carrying on against the greatest odds. Marilyn Harris saves lives.

Her Leadership

When her son was shot dead in 2000, Marilyn Harris had billboards erected across West Oakland with his picture and the stark question: Do You Know Who Killed Me? We still don't, but ever since then she has been an unapologetic defender and proponent of the victims of Oakland's implacable problem with violence. She is the inspiration for countless survivors and for violence prevention specialists throughout the city. An accomplished public speaker of unimpeachable credibilty, Harris is an articulate and reasoned voice of reality in a city grasping for healing. She has the ear of everyone, from city leaders to wounded and disaffected victims. In her own life, with self-effacing modesty, she demonstrates acceptance without surrender, while cajoling the powerful and the seemingly powerless to move forward, to see reality, to choose peace and forgiveness, and to maintain faith in the city and its people. With her humor, her honesty, her belief in the necessity of love and healing on a personal and a civic level, she is an example of the strength and fortitude to be found deep inside all of us. Every day, she leads individuals towards healing and Oakland toward its better self.

Oakland Violence Prevention Workers Grant and Gutierrez in the Media

In the past couple of weeks, two of the three violence prevention workers I profiled in No Escape, No Surrender (San Francisco Magazine, April 2012) have been featured in local media. First, Caheri Gutierrez and some of the students she works with at Castlemont High School (in the Teens on Target program, out of the nonprofit, Youth Alive) were interviewed for a KTVU news spot. Then Kevin Grant was the featured guest on KQED's Forum program. Caheri and her students talked about life in East Oakland and their work to create change. Kevin talked about trying to keep the peace between gangs and answered some tough questions about the state of things in Oakland here in the beginning a new year. Here are links:

Caheri Gutierrez on KTVU

Kevin Grant on Forum

Oakland's Kevin Grant Awarded California Peace Prize

I've written about Kevin Grant a lot on this blog. He has been a key participant in the city's Ceasefire gang call-ins and was one of the three Oakland violence prevention workers I profiled in San Francisco Magazine in April 2012. Kevin has been tireless in his efforts to keep the peace on the streets of Oakland and to lead young people here to a better way of life. Much of his work is funded by Measure Y. Now he has been recognized, along with two other Californians, by The California Wellness Foundation. They've awarded Kevin their annual Peace Prize. It's a big deal. Here's the press release, with what they had to say about him and his work:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE November 12, 2012 Contact: Laurie Kappe i.e. communications, LLC (415) 616-3930 Adriana Godoy Leiss The California Wellness Foundation (818) 702-1900

The California Wellness Foundation Announces 20th Annual California Peace Prize Honorees

Kevin Grant

Kevin Grant is a renowned expert in street outreach, violence mediation and re-entry programs. Growing up on the streets of Oakland, Grant himself was in and out of the juvenile justice system at a young age. Released from federal prison in 1989, Grant says he gained from his experience the motivation to change the direction of his life and the compassion to help others like himself. As a consultant, he provides probation and parole re-entry services and conducts trainings and workshops for law enforcement agencies, community service providers and school districts at local, state and federal levels. Grant is the violence prevention network coordinator for Measure Y, which was passed in Oakland in 2004 to fund violence prevention and public safety. He leads skilled street outreach teams made up of members of the community, who intervene to prevent conflict and/or retaliation before they happen in Oakland's most dangerous neighborhoods. 

"I believe that a lot of the violence in our communities is preventable," Grant said. "Through building relationships, we can give the power back to the communities." 

The California Wellness Foundation is a private, independent foundation created in 1992, with a mission to improve the health of the people of California by making grants for health promotion, wellness education and disease prevention.

The Foundation prioritizes eight issues for funding: diversity in the health professions, environmental health, healthy aging, mental health, teenage pregnancy prevention, violence prevention, women's health, and work and health. It also responds to timely issues and special projects outside the funding priorities.

Since its founding, TCWF has awarded 6,544 grants totaling more than $815 million. It is one of the state's largest private foundations. Please visit TCWF's website at CalWellness.org for more information, including a newsroom section devoted to the California Peace Prize and the three honorees. High-resolution photos are also available. Video interview clips are posted at TCWF's YouTube channel.