Two groups of boys around the ages of 13 converged on the Watergate Food Mart early one December afternoon. Situated between Norfolk’s Calvert Square and Young Terrace neighborhoods, the store had become known among residents as a hotspot for gun violence.
As the two groups approached, members of a violence intervention team run by the nonprofit Teens with a Purpose were watching.
At least one of the boys was carrying a handgun with a laser sight. Marvin Muhammad, who leads the after school Safe Passage team for Teens with a Purpose, said the mentors greeted the groups and defused the tension. When the teens saw the Safe Passage leaders, wearing recognizable reflective vests, they stutter-stepped.
“Don’t shoot, don’t shoot,” one boy told another.
The groups dispersed, and no violence was reported in the area that day. The intervention was described by Muhammad and documented in a report by the group, which concluded the leaders’ presence and greeting were key to the nonviolent outcome. The intervention is one of 15 the team has documented since October as part of routine walks through the neighborhood.
Teens with a Purpose is one of dozens of grassroots groups in Hampton Roads that work to prevent gun violence in the community, particularly among young people. Rather than focusing on locking people up as a deterrent, they work on addressing the root causes of gun violence — including poverty, access to guns, low education, poor mental health, and past exposure to violence — and steering young people on a more positive direction before it is too late.
The Virginian-Pilot and Daily Press spoke with mentors and participants from two community initiatives — Teens with a Purpose and the Hopeful Hampton Divergent Program — about their work to reduce gun violence and how they seek to provide teenagers and young adults with opportunities and resources.
Nearly half of the homicide victims in Hampton Roads last year were younger than 30, according to information provided by local police departments and compiled by The Pilot and Daily Press. About 10% were juveniles, another 10% were 18 or 19, while about 25% were in their 20s.
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Community connections
The best way to address these trends is at the community level, according to experts and legislators.
“It has to be community based, which means it has to be unique to every community,” said Del. Carrie Coyner, R-Chesterfield, who secured funding in the state budget this year for a gun violence reduction program in Hopewell. “That’s the key … it has to be small scale because the people you’re going out and talking to have to know that you’re from their community and there’s a level of trust that needs to be built.”
Mentors in such groups say their ability to help teenagers turn their lives around comes from understanding what they are going through. Many mentors have served time in jail. In coaching young people, they freely share stories about their own mistakes.
Hopeful Hampton mentor George Keenan, 46, grew up in Phoebus and said he was rebellious, “out in the streets on drugs, selling drugs, doing the whole nine.”
When he was 23, he killed a man and served time in prison. He could have faced up to 60 years in prison, or even the death penalty, under a first-degree murder charge. But the family of the victim pushed for the charges to be reduced to second-degree murder and encouraged him to make better choices. Their sense of mercy, he said, led to “a seed being planted.”
“I just wanted to transform my life to make my life something because I missed so much,” Keenan said. “And now I learn from my mistakes. Now, it’s my turn to give back to try to help some people.”
Mentoring, Keenan said, is about “giving a bit of yourself to a person who may need something to fill a void in their life, to let them know that you’ve been there, that they can rely on you.”
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Tapping into creative pursuits
Teens with a Purpose, founded in 1996 in Norfolk, focuses on providing at-risk youth with a safe place for creative pursuits. It tries to connect them with mentors and trained professionals and give them constructive, prosocial ways of earning money. It also incorporates mindfulness, meditation, healing circles and yoga as a way to teach a healthy lifestyle.
The nonprofit serves the Norfolk communities of St. Paul’s, Tidewater Gardens, Young Terrace, Calvert Square and Olde Huntersville, which have some of the highest crime and poverty rates in the city. It also has school-based programs in Suffolk and Virginia Beach. Its programming includes Safe Passage, a community garden, music production studio, poetry program, and a group for teenagers already involved in the criminal justice system.
Many of the organization’s paid staff are students who grew up in the program, said Executive Director Deirdre Love.
Malik Jordan, 24, is one such mentor. A self-described “angry” kid when he joined Teens with a Purpose at 11, Jordan now works as a program specialist. At 15, Jordan sparked the creation of the community garden, called Purpose Park, where residents can pick free fruits, vegetables and herbs.
The garden, once a barren gravel lot, is now an oasis providing a place to relax and a sustainable food source after a fire shut down the area’s primary grocery store. Teenagers are paid to tend the garden, providing them a positive job experience and an alternative source of income to those on the street.
“The thing I’m most proud of is that it provides for my community and the teens that live here, so it’s just something sustainable that we can have,” Jordan said. “We can be self-reliant, everything doesn’t have to come from (somewhere else).”
Many young people find their way into the program through the creative outlets offered. The focus on poetry and music is what sparked the interest of 17-year-old Trinity Parker.
“I just showed up one day, and they welcomed me with open arms, and I never left since,” said Parker, who joined two years ago.
When Parker came to Teens with a Purpose, she struggled with her anger, but has learned to manage her emotions better through meditation. The group’s collaborative, open environment allows conversations about societal issues which inspired Parker to deepen her self-expression and to come out of her shell.
“I see what goes on (in terms of violence and other struggles in the community), but to be able to hear it from actual people and basically hearing a common thing between everyone it’s like, ‘OK, this isn’t just me,'” Parker said. “It’s a group effort, a lot of people are going through a similar thing. I love how we’re able to use our art and our voice for that.”
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Intensive intervention
The Hopeful Hampton Divergent program is a 12-week intensive plan focused on teenagers and young adults who are likely to be involved in gun violence. The city-run program pairs youth with mentors who have had similar experiences.
The program is small, working with six to nine people at a time, and costs about $51,000 per 12-week session to run. Young people involved in the program are either using guns or have used them. Some are referred by the courts, law enforcement, schools or other community partners. Several have been ordered by the court to participate.
Jalen Tyriq Tisdale, 24, is a former gang member who spent time in jail. Since joining Hopeful Hampton, he said, he’s made significant accomplishments, like getting off of probation. Tisdale said he grew up in the projects and his father has been incarcerated since he was 13. He and his friends fought with kids from other neighborhoods, and the violence escalated to the point guns were introduced. He said many teens and young men carry firearms because they think it’s cool and “they want to be something they are not.”
“A lot of people aren’t mentally prepared for what comes with the gun when you pick the gun up,” he said. “And I had to learn that the hard way.”
Tisdale has lost several friends and family members to gun violence. His Hopeful Hampton mentor, Troy Ketchmore (who also has his own youth-focused nonprofit, Ketchmore Kids), connected with him over similar life experiences — including time in prison.
“He didn’t lie to me about anything,” Tisdale said. “He was vulnerable when first meeting me. Our bond has been strong. Mr. Troy taught me a lot. He taught me to humble myself. He’s taught me to always be calm and aware in every situation. You know, I had a bad anger problem, and Mr. Troy taught me a little trick to bring myself back down before I even get myself to that breaking point.”
During the 12-week program, the students meet twice a week at a community center. The sessions start with “mindfulness” or therapeutic exercises that set the tone for the rest of the evening. Tisdale said these types of exercises were among the most challenging parts of the program, as they required vulnerability.
“I had a lot of personal things going on that I wasn’t willing to share,” Tisdale said. “Just falling into the habit of talking to someone and letting it all out and just doing things the healthy way, instead of keeping things in and harboring it — yeah, that might have been the hardest thing for me to do, but now it’s easy.”
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Obstacles to intervention
One of the biggest obstacles violence intervention groups say they face is getting teenagers and their families to buy in. Tisdale admits he was timid and anxious going into the Hopeful Hampton program.
“I didn’t trust people, and I was just traumatized from all the things that were going on,” Tisdale said.
But he said his mentors persuaded him to trust the process and gradually, he let his guard down.
Young people often come from backgrounds where they don’t have adult male role models. Hopeful Hampton Mentor Adrian Cook said the lack of fathers in the home is a “big issue” and that single mothers often are frustrated and overwhelmed. The mentors can only instill positive values into participants for a few hours a week.
“When it’s not reinforced at home, it makes it complicated for it to stick,” said Latiesha Handie, the executive director for Hampton’s Office of Youth and Young Adult Opportunities. “So we have to put on additional layers of support to be more parental figures, in addition to service providers.”
To gain the young men’s trust, mentors explain how they’ve handled similar situations rather than trying to tell them what to do.
“That’s why he picks his phone up and he calls me when he’s going to do something or thinks about doing something stupid. He gets my advice, because I’m not sitting here going, ‘Oh, you can’t do this, you can’t do that,’” Keenan said of his 16-year-old mentee. “You can’t do that, or he’s gonna run away from you, he’s going to shut down.”
Jeffrey Butts, a research professor with John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a member of the Rockefeller Institute of Government Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium, said the two programs have based their approach to addressing gun violence on a “scientifically informed theory” about why young people sometimes act aggressively against others.
“And that theory is that when people grow up in an environment that exposes them to trauma, and family pain, and lack of opportunity, they start to feel like society’s rules don’t make sense for them,” Butts said. “And ‘Why should I bother to behave the way other people are telling me when the whole system is set up against me and I have to protect myself first?’”
However, Butts noted it’s complicated to determine the effectiveness of individual programs because they aren’t implemented on a large scale.
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Tracking success
To track interventions and success rates, Teens with a Purpose holds a debriefing after each Safe Passage walk through the community to discuss what they saw and heard. Mediators have hundreds of interactions during each walk, and since fall of 2023, they have documented 15 interventions when a gun was present and the situation was resolved without violence, according to Love.
The Safe Passage program was funded by the state for three years, at $130,000 annually, and the group also is surveying community members about their perceptions of safety since it began.
The Hampton program tracks recidivism rates for two years after young people leave the program, Handie said. So far, 73% of participants have completed the program. She said 40% of those who completed the program last year have so far successfully avoided negative encounters with law enforcement.
After finishing the Hampton program, Tisdale is focused on completing his education and working to become a counselor. He said the plan is “to become exactly what Mr. Troy was to me.”
Hopeful Hampton held a gala at the Virginia Air and Space Science Center in late April to celebrate those who completed the program, with hundreds of local elected officials, gun violence prevention advocates, law enforcement and family members present. At the ceremony, Tisdale was looking ahead.
“I want success for everybody that comes from where I came from, but you can’t have success if you don’t put the work in, day in and day out,” Tisdale said. “We want change, but we have to take the initial steps for the change to even start. We have to not only want change physically, but mentally as well. I am not the person I was seven years ago, but I stand here today — a proud young Black man who plans on changing the world one day.”
Gavin Stone, 757-712-4806, gavin.stone@virginiamedia.com
Josh Janney, joshua.janney@virginiamedia.com
