A Lexington city program is trying to keep youth out of ‘the cycle of violence.’ Here’s how

One Wednesday morning in early March, Fatou Sow was busily gathering her family’s belongings and showing others what needed to be moved from her family’s home. She was moving after someone opened fire outside her apartment building and sent bullets through her walls.

Devine Carama, the director of One Lexington, was among those helping Sow — loading the contents of an apartment on Winter Garden Drive into a U-Haul parked out front on the street.

He, along with Kenneth Payne, who also is employed by One Lexington, and a handful of volunteers maneuvered mattresses, dressers, a large sofa, boxes and bags down the stairs and carefully placed them in the truck.

Sow, a single mother, had been warming some food in her kitchen about a month earlier when the shots were fired. She and her young children were terrified.

“I had a bullet in my kitchen and in my car,” she said. Five police officers came inside to investigate.

Sow and her family were not the intended targets of the shooting, but it left the children traumatized and made Sow uneasy to continue living in the neighborhood they had called home for nine years.

“I’m all the time worried that that may happen to my kids,” she said.

When crisis response advocates from One Lexington reached out to her, Sow told them she just wanted to get away.

“I told them I don’t feel safe here,” she said.

So One Lexington helped her get away. The organization rented the U-Haul and provided the labor needed to help Sow get her furniture loaded up. They also paid for her first month’s rent in a new place across town.

And they offered emotional support and care.

“How are you?” Carama asked Sow as he took a momentary break from moving furniture. “Are you good?”

He told her about a summer camp for kids and encouraged her to get connected with it. Transportation could be provided if needed, he said.

Helping support people like Sow’s family who have been hurt by gun violence is a major focus area for One Lexington. The organization, which operates out of the mayor’s office, is the city’s primary tool for trying to stop gun violence among people between the ages of 13 and 29.

“We’re taking a different approach to youth violence, and it’s working,” Mayor Linda Gorton said in a recent interview. “It is a wonderful, community-oriented program. It’s very, very focused on victim support and helping ... the young people find ways to cope, ways to deal with disappointment in our lives, deal with disagreement.”

One Lexington’s work is broad-sweeping.

Carama and other workers are trying to prevent violence by helping mediate conflicts, mentoring kids in schools and hosting summer programs for them.

They’re visiting shooting victims, helping them move to new neighborhoods if necessary, and taking groceries to areas where shootings have occurred just to show someone cares.

They’re working with young people in the court system.

They’re helping people feel like their voices are being heard by holding community forums on violence and facilitating meetings between the mayor and moms who have lost children to gun violence. They’ve also held hip-hop and poetry workshops as a way of letting kids use music to express themselves.

And they’re partnering with community organizations — both small and large — that are already working toward the same goals.

“To tackle these issues, we understand that the city can’t solve these problems alone,” One Lexington’s website states. “This work calls for our faith and non-profit communities, schools, neighborhood leaders, along with our city government partners to wrap all our arms, hearts, and resources around these issues to make a difference.”

The agency is looking to the medical system, school system and smaller community organizations for help in preventing shootings.

Recently, One Lexington has worked with the University of Kentucky’s trauma unit on a hospital-based violence intervention program called Safety Net. When someone comes in with a gunshot wound, a hospital social worker can help connect the victim with One Lexington and other organizations to find out what they might need in terms of mentoring, help with bills or other supports.

In the past, Gorton said, people injured in a shooting would be “discharged, end of story.”

Now, she said, they can “have an intervention with people who have a gunshot wound ... to determine what it is that they might need to get off the path right then and there while they’re in the hospital.”

Earlier this year, the city and One Lexington presented grants to 16 Fayette County schools whose students have been most affected by homicides and non-fatal shootings. The schools’ Family Resource and Youth Service Centers can use the grants to help families with basic needs and to help kids with mental health.

When the high school grant recipients decided to use their funding to host a symposium on gun violence, Payne, a former state social worker, used One Lexington’s van to drop students off.

The conference featured five stations “designed to educate the youth on how to refrain from using violence as a way to solve conflict, preventive measures to gun violence, healthy coping skills, gain trauma informed education, yoga and other forms of mindfulness,” Carama said in an email.

‘Focused on root causes’

Carama said that when kids have witnessed shootings, One Lexington asks “how can we prevent them from getting in the cycle of violence?”

This summer, Carama said the agency will hold a summer program that will offer educational and skill-building opportunities to some of the kids who most need help. All are from lower-income homes, and many have been directly impacted by gun violence.

In the mornings, he said the program brings in mental health specialists and offers workshops on topics such as conflict resolution and money management. The latter part of the day, Carama said, is about “loving on them and having fun.”

“You start to peel the layers back,” Carama said. “Once we build the relationship, you find that there’s mental health resources needed. You’ve got low income in the house.”

One Lexington is able to help connect those families with employment opportunities, counselors or other help.

“We’re focused on root causes,” he said. “We’re trying to gear our resources toward those things before they lead to violence.”

For Carama, it’s a constant back-and-forth between meetings and administrative duties and more boots-on-the-ground work like moving couches and sitting with middle school boys to talk about their lives.

In the middle of helping Sow move, he and Payne stopped what they were doing, jumped in a car and headed to a nearby public library. There they quickly reserved a conference room and hosted an online meeting with representatives from law enforcement and public safety, Fayette County Public Schools, prosecutors, nonprofits and the UK trauma center.

It’s known as the Violence Intervention Group, and the purpose of these weekly check-ins is to review every shooting case involving young people that has happened since the last meeting and to plan how One Lexington, school support staff and other community agencies can support the people involved.

Sometimes representatives of One Lexington may already know or have relationships with people involved.

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Violence ‘can spread rapidly in the city’

When there is a shooting involving someone in the 13 to 29 age group, or a home is shot at with minors there, one of several crisis response advocates contracted by One Lexington tries to visit them and their family as soon as possible to find out how they can help.

“We look at violence as a cancer that can rapidly spread in the city,” said Nestor Gomez, one of the crisis response advocates. “Revenge in the streets leads to more violence.”

Terry Dumphord, who is also a crisis response advocate, said they “try to get to the root of the problem. Who do you have problems with?”

If possible, he said they will “try to create a positive resolve.”

“When we give them an out, a lot of times they’ll try to to take it,” Dumphord said of young people facing personal conflicts that have escalated to violence. “A lot of these kids are in over their head. ... If you need help in your household, we’re going to try to step in.”

Through the advocates, Gomez said One Lexington will also “try to alleviate some of the burden” shooting victims are facing by helping with a rent or mortgage payment, utility bills or other expenses.

Gomez said the key is “making sure that they feel seen and know that they’re being heard by the city.”

Recently, he said he worked with a Latino couple and their children. He said the two older boys were driving when “somebody just rolled down the window and shot at them,” hitting one of the brothers, a college student who also holds down a job, in the leg.

“They were really concerned, like, ‘Why did this happen to us,’” Gomez said. “They were just in so much distress.”

He said the family was afraid and wondered if they had been targeted. They didn’t know what steps police were taking in investigating the case and there was a language barrier as well.

Gomez, a pastor who is bilingual in English and Spanish, said he was able to arrange a visit by the police detective to help keep the family informed.

Because the parents had lost income from having to take off work while dealing with the situation, he said the city was taking care of their utilities and mortgage for a month or so.

“Here’s a life that has been completely changed,” he said. “Regardless of their immigration status, the city’s here to back them up.”

Crisis response advocates also try to address the broader neighborhood’s concerns after a shooting.

“We’ll just go out with some grocery bags,” Gomez said. “Just to show them that we know what’s going on.”

Those kinds of efforts might just be what keeps someone from retaliating with another shooting, he said.

“The more we do this, the more we’re coming across (people saying), ‘I was getting ready to go out and find whoever did it and engage,’” Gomez said.

Earlier this year, the city hired Payne to oversee One Lexington’s crisis response efforts and began contracting with Gomez, Dumphord and a third advocate to help.

Carama said that has allowed One Lexington to respond to more shooting scenes than before, reaching out to more people.

“I feel like we’ve seen a really positive response in the narrative that is being told in the neighborhood and in the streets,” Gomez said.

He thinks organization and community participation will be key going forward.

“The more organized these communities become, the safer we will all be,” Gomez said. “One or two of us may not be strong enough to chase out the bad guys, but if we all come together, that will happen.”

He said that if the city makes the most vulnerable a priority, “the whole city flourishes.”

‘I don’t know where me and my family would be without them’

Markita Givens said Carama himself reached out to her after she was injured in a shooting, and though she hadn’t heard about the team at One Lexington before that, she learned that Carama had already met and connected with her son.

“He has been a tremendous support system,” she said. “He’s one of those people that you can talk to about anything. It doesn’t matter what time of day or night. He’s always there for me.”

She said Carama has become someone she can text if she’s having a rough day, and One Lexington has helped connect her with resources to help her cope.

“They were very accepting, loving and gracious,” she said. “I don’t know where me and my family would be without them, without One Lexington.”

‘We built the relationship’

One recent spring evening, Carama, Payne, Dumphord and Doyle Lee showed up to see a boy from one of Dumphord and Lee’s school mentoring groups at his home.

One Lexington has 15 mentoring groups in 11 Fayette County schools. Four are led by Carama, while others are led by mentors like Dumphord and Lee, who contract with One Lexington and together work with kids at Martin Luther King Jr. Academy, Success Academy, The Learning Center and STEAM Academy.

At one of their meetings, Dumphord had picked up on the fact that the boy’s family could use some help with food, so the group of men stopped by with boxes of groceries and a Kroger gift card.

“We built the relationship with this young man,” Lee said. “Sometimes it’s the first time in their life that they can be open and honest. ... He literally was taking from his plate and making sure his brothers and sisters eat.”

The men circled up in the quiet house and offered him some encouragement during their visit.

Dumphord urged the teen to “pay it forward” by helping someone else.

Lee told him that included his brothers and sisters. “Have your mom reach out” if more help is needed, he said.

During the 2022-23 school year, the It Takes a Village In-School Mentoring Programs had 4,178 interactions with students, including more than 80 interactions with students in the court system, Carama said in a recent update. He said 80% of the participants in the programs have been directly impacted by gun violence.

Is it working?

Gorton said the strategy is working.

From 2021 through the first quarter of this year, she said the city saw a 75% decrease in gun-related homicides among youth and young adults.

“That’s huge, and that’s measurable,” Gorton said. “This is what we’re going for.”

Lexington did report a handful of additional homicides and shootings at the end of April into early May, a few of which involved younger residents: an 18-year-old was killed in a shooting April 30, and a 23-year-old and 16-year-old were killed in separate shootings on May 5.

Through May 15, there had been seven gun-related homicides in Lexington, compared to 10 by the same point last year and 15 the year before, according to Lexington police data. Of those, four of the victims this year were between ages 13 and 29, compared to five in 2022 and 11 in 2021.

Excluding homicides, police reported 28 shootings through May 15 this year, compared to 41 by the same point last year and 39 by that point in 2021. In those cases, 19 of the victims this year were between 13 and 29 years old, as opposed to 31 by that point last year and 29 by May 15, 2021.

“How do you measure homicides that don’t happen?” Carama said in an interview. “You’re starting to see progress, because these things take time.”

Carama said the problems connected to gun violence were “centuries in the making.”

“We’re fighting more than just food deserts and gentrification,” he said. “We can’t ignore what we were all fighting for in 2020.”

As he closed a recent meeting with people working to address gun violence in Lexington, Carama said “things are a lot better than they were last year and the year before.”

But he said the numbers don’t tell the whole story.

“There’s a lot of bullets flying around out there right now,” he told the group. “Stay vigilant. Stay humble. Keep working.”

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