Our spotlights highlight some of our incredible community partners across Washington State who are doing vital work in gun violence prevention, intervention, and healing. Each spotlight can be found below:
Yakima, Washington | cpcocw.org/walk-about-yakima
1. Who does your organization serve and where? Are there particular populations or communities that are a primary focus of your work?
Walk About Yakima serves gang-involved youth and young adults in Yakima who are at high risk of killing or being killed by firearm violence. Their primary focus is young men between the ages of 13 and 24; approximately 80% identify as Hispanic or Latino, and nearly all have been impacted by the criminal legal system.
2. Can you tell us about some of the work your organization is doing related to gun violence prevention, intervention, and/or healing?
The foundation of Walk About Yakima’s intervention work is credible mentoring. Staff mentors are highly trained and bring lived experience with the challenges their mentees face. Mentors build trusting, supportive relationships utilizing restorative circles and dialectical behavior therapy to promote healing, reduce impulsivity, and teach emotional regulation and better decision-making. Walk About Yakima also provides direct logistical and financial support for basic needs — helping mentees pursue education and employment, secure stable housing, obtain driver’s licenses, and participate in life-enriching activities. Over the course of their participation, most mentees report improvements in self-efficacy, stronger coping mechanisms, and a reduced sense of need to carry a firearm.
3. What has been your organization’s biggest accomplishment to date?
With support from the C-FIP team, Walk About Yakima has refined its theory of change and intervention model over the past five years, providing effective, evidence-informed support to more than 130 young people. The organization is now entering a teaching phase — developing training for other organizations with the goal of further reducing firearm violence rates in Yakima and beyond.
Durell Green
Choose Freedom Program Manager
1. What is your role at your organization?
My name is Durell Green, I am the program manager of the CHOOSE Freedom program at CHOOSE 180. Our goal is to work with the young people in our community most impacted by the cycle of gun violence, whether survivors or perpetrators. I strongly believe that healing is needed for everyone involved on all sides of the equation.
2. What brought you into this role or to the work of gun violence prevention, intervention, and/or healing more broadly?
My introduction to this work began before I realized it as I was sitting in a maximum security prison at 18 for a crime committed with a gun. Given time to think and begin my own healing I recognized my situation was bigger than me and that people like myself had a responsibility to respond.
I started volunteering in gang intervention and reentry which led me to CHOOSE 180. Taking hope into the streets and prisons became my life mission. Given the trauma involved in this work it can be hard at times to wonder if you are making an impact, and if the efforts are futile.
3. What is the most rewarding aspect of your work?
Seeing the resilience of our young people never ceases to inspire me. At their stage of development, I accepted life as it was and had no optimism for my future. They however, graduated school, worked jobs, and pushed forward amidst some of the worst statistical times of gun violence in our community. CHOOSING FREEDOM. It is my honor, privilege, and duty to continue making amends for my own contributions and equipping those who will truly lead us to healed communities in the next generation.