Jelks grew up in Roseland with three brothers and three sisters. He was running with gangs by the time he was 8, a crew leader by 12. Convicted three times on weapons charges, he now works the streets for YPC trying to persuade other young men to put down the guns that are a fixture in this corner of the far South Side of Chicago. Armed with a yellow vest and ample charisma, he pitches Understand We Love You, a group he and his friend Lorenzo Taylor started to recruit young men to YPC and the opportunities it offers.
“A lot of guys in the neighborhood look up to me,” Jelks says. “We want to show them how to go about doing something the right way, ’cause we were taught the wrong way.” Loyalty to the gang, which governed his life for a decade, has been replaced by a commitment to the men in this new brotherhood. “I’d die for these guys if I had to because I want them to succeed in life,” he says. “If we’re not here for each other, nothing will get better.”
A generation ago, during a 1990s wave of homicides, not unlike what Chicago and other cities have faced since the pandemic, Jelks might have been called a “superpredator” — a term coined by a Princeton academic and embraced by media and lawmakers to describe Black teens who were chronic offenders. In the racist caricature, these young men were devoid of moral reasoning or empathy because of childhoods in broken homes. Locking them in prison for years was the only way to end violence, the theory argued.
Today, Jelks and others like him are seen as a solution to violence. They work the front lines of what’s known as community violence intervention, a broad term for a variety of grassroots strategies deployed in urban neighborhoods where violence is concentrated. Programs identify those who are likely to take the life of another or be shot themselves. Their premise: To stop the shooting, you have to work with the shooters.
While decades old, such work only recently has begun to win broad public and private support. Donors include venerable foundations like Joyce, MacArthur, and Polk Bros., as well as new-wealth tech billionaires Laurene Powell Jobs and Steve and Connie Ballmer.
Violence intervention is not a simple solution. It’s dangerous, expensive, and unproven in the eyes of most researchers. Most proponents see it as a supplement to law enforcement, not a substitute. Success is fragile and frustratingly incremental. Yet the people doing the work inspire hope. Unlike with “superpredator” remedies to violence, they recognize each person’s innate goodness and the trauma that many have suffered. To save lives, they aim to change lives.
Risks and Rewards
On any given morning, 25 or so men arrive at the YPC entrance, where security guards run a metal-detecting wand up and down their bodies. YPC is a men-only program serving the predominantly Black Roseland area. Data indicates that these men are among the most likely to take a life with a gun or be shot themselves. Nationally, Black men ages 15 to 34 are 25 times more likely to die from firearms than young white males, according to federal data.
Jelks arrived with the others one day this summer in the bright yellow vest that identifies YPC outreach workers on the streets. He joked with friends, including Taylor, his smile flashing from a smooth, cherubic face.
Sunlight flooded YPC from a large skylight. Laughter flowed, and cookies and chips were available for the taking. In a meeting room, handwritten notes on a flipboard outlined in two neat columns a group’s earlier discussion of the pros and cons of street life. Money, cars, and clout fell under “Rewards"; “Risks” included “getting shot” and “losing people close to you.”
Another room featured a sign with 10 “Community Safety Tips.” #1: Don’t turn on your cellphone location. #10: Don’t stand with your back to the street.
Violence-intervention programs vary, but most dispatch outreach workers — often former gang members and ex-offenders — to high-crime neighborhoods to mediate disputes and negotiate gang truces. Less well known is the work that groups like the Youth Peace Center do to persuade young men — and it’s mostly men — to put down their guns and build a new life through education, job training, counseling, and coaching in cognitive behavioral skills. Most important, perhaps, mentors and clinical therapists aim to help participants process trauma they may have experienced, sometimes repeatedly — abuse, the death of loved ones, witnessing a shooting, being shot. They have to tend to emotional wounds from the past before they can build a future.
Newcomers to YPC get $125 weekly to “stay off the block,” as participants put it, with the stipend growing to $225 as they move through a 12- to 24-month program. Some participants sign up for the money. Some simply want to stay safe. Since 2010, there have been more than 1,500 shootings in Roseland. The four-square-mile area has just under 40,000 residents. “It’s crazy out there,” says Mark Richmond, a 23-year-old participant. “You could die at any moment.”
Anthony Bell, 33, enrolled in the program after a stray bullet hit his 5-year-old daughter on her way to day care. She lived, but Bell says he began to reconsider gang life. “What if I hurt somebody else’s kid?” he asked himself.
Jelks joined YPC’s program in early 2021, not long after his third prison stint, this one for carrying a machine gun. He was determined to get job training and earn a living outside his gang. The 2020 murders of three loved ones in quick succession — two cousins and one of his two older brothers — had hit him hard. He says he barely remembers the funerals because he was taking drugs to numb his pain. Something had to change.
‘A Strong Married Couple’
Inner-city community leaders have done violence intervention for decades, often with spotty government funding. Black churches in Boston were key to the “Boston Miracle” in the 1990s, when youth homicides declined 63 percent. Black activist Erica Ford’s Life Camp has been running a range of programs in her native Queens, N.Y., since 2002 and has expanded nationwide.
Rogers and Wendy Jones, longtime Roseland residents, founded Youth Peace Center in 2007. The two had grown up in the neighborhood when it was filled with solidly middle-class families and tidy homes. “It was like a suburb,” Wendy says.
In the 1980s and 1990s, however, inflation and the collapse of the steel and auto industries had stripped families of their livelihoods. Stores in the once bustling business district were boarded up. By the early 2000s, it wasn’t uncommon for the Joneses to hear the roar of police helicopters following the last bell at the nearby high school, blades chopping the air over a fight or a shooting. Rogers was working with at-risk youths in the juvenile courts. Wendy, a former elementary teacher, had started a business called Pretend Town, where schoolchildren on field trips imagined they were bakers and bankers and shopkeepers and learned about the businesses and institutions that anchor most communities but are harder to find here.
Worried about the increasing violence, the two started inviting older kids to visit and talk. Remembers Rogers: “We used to stand out on the corner and say, ‘What are you doing after school? Nothing? Come on in here.” Word spread, and soon they were hosting as many as 100 kids for Friday night gatherings at Pretend Town. “There was food and a D.J. and a whole lot of love,” Wendy says.
At first, YPC worked as a subcontractor for another nonprofit that dispersed small grants from state funding. But in 2016, word of its work reached Arne Duncan, a former Chicago schools chief and U.S. secretary of education under President Obama. After leaving Washington in 2015, Duncan started Chicago CRED (Create Real Economic Destiny), a violence-prevention group, with backing from Laurene Powell Jobs. Although he grew up in Hyde Park, a relatively safe area of the South Side, Duncan had lost friends to gun violence, kids he’d met on the basketball court and at his mother’s after-school program. While running the Chicago schools, he routinely attended funerals for slain students.
Wendy and Rogers Jones — now 64 and 74, respectively — were CRED’s first partners. “They walk on water,” Duncan says of the Black couple. “They are two extraordinary leaders. To have a strong married couple is frankly very unusual in the community and a really powerful example to our men about what that looks like.”
In 2017, YPC’s revenue jumped tenfold to $760,000. By 2020, it topped $1.4 million. Powell Jobs is investing roughly $25 million annually in violence-prevention efforts in the city. At the start, Duncan says, he warned her that the work would be hard, with no guarantee of success, but she didn’t balk. “She said — and I’ll never forget this — ‘I want to take on society’s most intractable problems for the next 25 or 30 years.’”
‘Dangerously Afraid’
YPC is one of three Chicago groups that implement CRED’s violence-prevention program. Case managers connect participants to services for housing, food, cash, legal help, and more. Tutors are available 24/7 to help those studying online for their high-school diploma. YPC instructors, mentors, and life coaches teach classes on financial literacy and the soft skills needed for an everyday job, from knotting a tie to showing up on time. At a CRED site elsewhere in the city, participants get a job coach and training in construction, computer-assisted design, and other trades.
Such nonprofit supports are fairly typical in low-income neighborhoods. Others are not. YPC’s cognitive behavioral coaching teaches anger management, conflict resolution, and how to step back from volatile situations. The curriculum has more than 20 modules, with titles like “Making Good Decisions,” “Understanding Anger,” and “Coping With Feelings.”
Word spread, and soon the Joneses were hosting as many as 100 kids. “There was food and a D.J. and a whole lot of love.”
YPC also provides extensive counseling — one-on-one counseling, group therapy, art therapy, and more. Many participants have experienced what therapists call “complex trauma” in which emotionally damaging events pile up quickly, leaving little time to process and heal. Stress never abates as the men await — and protect against — the next bad thing, constantly on edge, too tense to sleep, tempers easily ignited. Ta-Nehisi Coates, a prominent Black writer who grew up in a tough part of Baltimore, captures this state of mind in his book Between the World and Me when he describes young men in his neighborhood as “powerfully, adamantly, and dangerously afraid.”
“Clinically, we have to separate the person from the experience so that they objectively see how they respond and so that they can start to heal,” says Phylicia Noel, one of two CRED therapists at YPC.
Counseling helped Jelks explore and process a series of traumas in his life. His mom had cooked and sold cocaine from their home. Police raided the house once. At 15, he was shot four times in a fight with a rival gang and confined to a wheelchair for four months. Desperate for revenge, he had rolled his chair down the flight of stairs from his family’s second-floor apartment, then pulled himself down step by step while carrying an AK-47. “I was hurt, so I wanted to hurt them,” he says.
Working with a therapist, he came to realize that his stint in the wheelchair had left him terrified of being shot again. He had carried increasingly more firepower for protection and to maintain his tough street persona. Still, he says, “I always had in my heart to do right.”
Life coaches provide another key relationship. They are typically older men who were “in the life” previously. Coaches are available anytime — for advice, spare cash, a ride to the store, whatever. Mark Richmond’s life coach took him to the DMV six times until he finally secured his driver’s license. “I ain’t used to having folks look out for me like this,” Richmond says.
Coaches know firsthand how guns offer both protection and credibility in gang culture. “I had a love for firearms — not necessarily to bother people but because I knew how their power was respected,” says life coach Jervon Hicks, who has been arrested 10 times.
Even as staff members try to help participants turn from street life, they emphasize the positive personal qualities that helped them survive there — courage, tenacity, strategic thinking. “If you look at any of their backgrounds, most of society would just like to lock them up and throw away the key. They’re a menace to society,” Duncan says. “But actually we’re getting safer and safer because of them. Without their leadership, we’re wasting our time.”
‘Do I Want to Do This?’
“I found my peace coming here,” Dantrell Jelks says of his first days at YPC. In cognitive behavioral sessions, he embraced “the power of the pause” and tried to check impulsive behavior. Now removed from the demands of gang loyalty, he began to assess risk differently. “Do I want to do this? Do I want to lose my life over something that’s worthless?”
Through YPC, Jelks earned certificates in leadership and de-escalation of conflict. Through an online program, he got his high-school diploma and later, at CRED’s job-training facility, a certificate in construction. For now, he’s focused on the young men in Understand We Love You.
CRED has served about 1,000 people since 2016. According to the organization, hundreds now work in manufacturing, transportation, hospitality, professional services, and, yes, violence prevention. CRED participants are about 50 percent less likely to be shot or rearrested than if they hadn’t been in the program, according to preliminary Northwestern University research of a small sample size.
Success is hard-earned. CRED spends more than $30,000 a year on each participant — less than the cost to the state or county for housing a prisoner, but still expensive.
Violence-intervention work also is exhausting and dangerous. About two dozen CRED participants and alumni have been shot and killed. In January, gang members lay in wait outside YPC and gunned down a 24-year-old participant as he left the building, also shooting a security guard.
Burnout among workers is common, in part because of their commitment, says Kelly Carroll, a former CRED clinician who’s now creating a wellness program for staff at the Institute for Nonviolence, another Chicago intervention group. They often refuse to take breaks from the emotional 24-hour grind.
“Everyone in this work is writing their own redemption narrative,” Carroll says. “Everyone feels like they’ve caused harm in some way, and they want to make up for that.”
Whatever the strength of their commitment to a new life, the pull of the gun culture remains. Life coach Hicks, who’s been on the YPC staff for two years, says he still wonders if he should carry a gun. “I sit back and think sometimes: Am I making the right move by not protecting myself, by taking a chance on somebody from some long time ago coming back to haunt me?”
Jelks says it hurts to know the people who killed his brother and cousins roam free. “The person I once was wouldn’t allow that,” he says. “It’s hard not being able to go get your get-back.”
Now, Jelks says, he leaves it to God to extract the revenge. “I just live my life and try to stay focused.”
Reporting for this article was underwritten by a Lilly Endowment grant to enhance public understanding of philanthropy. The Chronicle is solely responsible for the content. See more about the Chronicle, the grant, how our foundation-supported journalism works, and our gift-acceptance policy.
