“We’re here for support, to help [people] to thrive, survive, to live life, and to give them all the resources they need…to prevent violence.”
An outreach worker who follows the sound of gunshots as he drives to his next intervention. A judge who uses her courtroom to practice restorative justice. A mom of eight children who runs a grassroots organization to provide resources to youth in her Roseland community. A man who grew up in a gang-involved family strives to bring peace to his Puerto Rican neighborhood. A formerly incarcerated man who works to prevent local young people from repeating his mistakes, on the same streets where he formerly sold drugs.
Through their firsthand accounts, we witness the daily struggles and triumphs of everyday people who are working to create peace in Chicago's neighborhoods.
Damien Morris is a man on a mission to make one Chicago neighborhood safer. He finds himself driving from one crisis to the next as he stops at crime scenes, visits victims at the hospital, mediates disputes, brokers peace agreements, and leads peace circles in the pouring rain. But when Garfield Park’s violence hits too close to home, Damien’s peacekeeping skills are put to the test.
Every Thursday, Judge Patricia Spratt takes a break from her regular routine – ruling on contentious financial disputes in a Maywood courtroom – to turn her attention to something entirely different: healing and reconciliation. In leading the North Lawndale Restorative Justice Community Court, she strives with empathy and humor to transform young lives through restorative justice, which actively works to repair the harm caused by crime. By treating victims and offenders alike with compassion – something with which people who come before her are often unfamiliar – Judge Spratt is helping to heal her community, one case at a time. But a new and troubling development might negatively impact this work: the just-installed Cook County State’s Attorney, Eileen O’Neill Burke, has decreed that, despite proven success in preventing repeat offenses, the city’s Restorative Justice Community Courts will no longer be entrusted with gun cases.
Near her modest home in Roseland, Diane Latiker sorrowfully collects small slabs of concrete, each one commemorating a life tragically lost to gun violence. She hopes to incorporate them into a permanent memorial to these fallen neighbors. 20 years ago, she founded the grassroots organization Kids Off the Block in her living room to provide food, clothing, school supplies, activities, and often, a sympathetic ear to local youth to provide alternatives to drugs and gangs. As she and her team members keep up with shootings and offer help and support to the families of victims, she recalls better days in Roseland, a place she still loves.
Adrian Rodriguez, an outreach worker with the Puerto Rican Cultural Center, is working to bring peace to the same streets that his gang-involved family once claimed as their territory. Now he's using those same neighborhood connections to broker peace and build community. He and his team, among their other activities, keep vigil at the high school, making connections with kids to discourage them from joining gangs. We watch as Adrian breaks up an escalating fight, advocates with Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson at a street festival, and helps young men channel their aggression by giving them formal training at a boxing facility. But for all his efforts, a late-summer walk through Humboldt Park reveals to Adrian that his neighborhood’s challenges run deeper than he had ever imagined.
Emerging from prison after a commuted sentence, at first Cedric Hawkins was not inclined to get involved in violence intervention. But he came to see that he shouldn’t let his second chance go to waste, and returned to Chicago to push peace in the same neighborhoods where he once sold narcotics. We follow Cedric as he works for a nonprofit that de-escalates conflicts, brokers peace agreements among local gangs, and recruits others to help in these efforts. But Cedric gets a painful reminder of how much work is left to be done when one of his teenage participants is brutally shot and killed.
Get to know the stories of people a who are working to prevent violence across Chicago’s neighborhoods through five documentaries, five talks by community and thought leaders offering historical context and new ideas for violence interruption, and community screenings and conversations in partnership with Chicago CRED and Breakthrough.
