COMMUNITY ACTIVIST SEES THE VALUE OF RELATIONSHIPS IN COMBATTING VIOLENCE

BO1 – Bamani Obadele is a community engagement director for Acclivus, Inc. where he’s using his more than 20 years of experience as a community organizer and advocate to work with residents, organizations, stakeholders and elected officials to decrease violence. Photo by Tia Carol Jones
BO1 – Bamani Obadele is a community engagement director for Acclivus, Inc. where he’s using his more than 20 years of experience as a community organizer and advocate to work with residents, organizations, stakeholders and elected officials to decrease violence. Photo by Tia Carol Jones

Community activist sees the value of relationships in combatting violence

BY TIA CAROL JONES

Bamani Obadele has been involved with community organizing, public policy and advocacy for more than 20 years. Now, he is bringing his experience to Acclivus, Inc. as a community engagement director.

Obadele said his work in community organizing started off socially, but became political at some point along the way. He said he feels a sense of pride and joy in working in the community.

Obadele worked with LeVon Stone, while Stone was at Ceasefire, then went on to do work with Acclivus, Inc., a community health organization that uses its social network to serve individuals in the city’s most vulnerable neighborhoods.

“This year, we’ve expanded into six communities on the South side with a strategy for violence reduction,” Obadele said. “My job is to engage with the community, civic, community stakeholders and elected officials around the work that we’re doing at Acclivus, Inc.”

Obadele said he also works with the organizational supervisors to provide them with direction in working with the community. He said he takes a holistic approach in addressing community violence. “You can have street outreach guys, but it’s going to take working with residents and law enforcement and elected officials to solve the problem,” he said.

Obadele added focusing on workforce development is also a part of the approach. He said it’s an area in which Acclivus, Inc. is expanding. According to Obadele, Acclivus, Inc. also uses an interdisciplinary approach when it comes to addressing violence.

He added people with lived experience, people who had been involved in street organizations, people who had been assailants and those who had been victims—helped start the organization because they wanted to have, “an African American perspective in addressing violence,” he said. “You would not find a more robust organization with folks with lived experience and [who] have the credentials and [who] have the insight and relationships to be able to address and to do the work,” he added.

Obadele said the most important part of the work Acclivus, Inc. is doing is engaging with high risk individuals. Acclivus, Inc. makes housing referrals for those individuals as well as talks them down in certain situations.

He added he doesn’t think people really realize the depth of street outreach that is taking place across the city. “There are outreach workers who are everyday putting their life on the line to address community violence in a very sincere and high-level way,” he said. It is very important, he added, to establish relationships with high risk individuals in the community.

Building relationships with high risk individuals in the community is key towards reducing violence, he said. Being able to go into any community in areas where even police couldn’t go, having the types of relationships to be able to find out what happened, and in some cases, talk people down, are all a part of reducing the violence he explained.

Obadele went on to say that even though the outreach workers may not have been able to prevent every single incident, he thinks they’ve done “a great job” with getting involved and with mitigating the incidence of the shootings.

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