Local Collaborative Aims to Address Violence In Nine Neighborhoods Across Chicago

Vaughn Bryant (pictured), executive director of Communities Partnering For Peace. Photo Credit: Metropolitan Family Services
Vaughn Bryant (pictured), executive director of Communities Partnering For Peace. Photo Credit: Metropolitan Family Services

Local Collaborative Aims to Address Violence In Nine Neighborhoods Across Chicago

BY KATHERINE NEWMAN

Communities Partnering For Peace, a collaborative organization convened by Metropolitan Family Services, was created to provide the framework for a long-term approach to reducing violence in Chicago. Nine established anti-violence organizations were selected to make up the collaborative where they work together to share resources and create violence reduction strategies which are then implemented in the communities they serve.

“Communities Partnering for Peace is a collaborative made up of nine organizations including Metropolitan Family Services. Our goal is to reduce violence in Chicago,” said Vaughn Bryant, executive director of Communities Partnering For Peace.

The nine organizations that make up the Communities Partnering For Peace collaborative were chosen after a Request For Proposal process that was conducted by Metropolitan Family Services.

“These are organizations that have been doing this for a lot of years prior,” said Bryant. “Street outreach has been done in some way since the 1940s or 50s and in more recent times, there has started to be some state funding and private funding going towards these organizations,” said Bryant.

Communities Partnering For Peace is currently working in nine Chicago neighborhoods including Austin, Englewood, West Englewood, North Lawndale, Little Village, Garfield Park, East Garfield Park, Back of the Yards, and Humboldt Park.

Through Communities Partnering For Peace, the Peace Academy at Kennedy-King College in Englewood was created to help professionalize street outreach work in Chicago. The Peace Academy offers comprehensive training for community outreach workers and helps them develop the skills they need to reach their targeted population.

The Peace Academy curriculum helps outreach workers gain a better understanding of the relationship between trauma, family violence, and street violence and provides them with ways to support community members as they return from incarceration and reduce recidivism, according to information provided by Metropolitan Family Services.

“What we have done is put together a 144- hour curriculum to professionalize [street outreach] work. We want this to be seen as a legitimate profession that people can go into that has a clear career ladder attached to it,” said Bryant. “We are really trying to build a network of outreach workers across the city because if you have a large amount of peacemakers who are on the same page and who understand each other then it builds a momentum that is going to sustain and change the trajectory of our city over the next 10 or 15 years.”

So far, the Peace Academy has trained street outreach workers from about 15 different communities and about 21 different organizations and the goal is to establish a certification process to even further legitimize the training they provide.

One of our goals is to have a certification process,” said Bryant. “If there are standards of practice, then it’s legitimized amongst community members and when they see Communities Partnering For Peace or the Metropolitan Family Services Peace Academy, they will know what to expect from them.”

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