The Cleveland suburb of Euclid will hold a community-wide discussion May 17 to develop a five-part plan to reduce gun violence, especially among youth, with the intent to implement that plan within the year.
The meeting is a culmination of months of community listening and learning sessions prompted by two Euclid High School students being shot outside the school, one fatally, in late 2022. This event led Pam Turos and two other parents to found the Euclid Hope Task Force to address the gun violence issue.
“We just want a safe community where kids feel safe playing outside, where we don't ever have to give another Euclid High School graduate a posthumous diploma," Turos said.
The task force has worked with Case Western Reserve University on the listening and learning sessions since last fall.
Holding listening sessions with community members is essential because the community should drive conversations like these, said Mark Chupp, associate professor and director of the Community Innovation Network at the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences at CWRU.
“It's inappropriate to come in from the outside and say, here's the plan for your community," he said. "We need to first listen to the community about what their lived experience is, what matters to them. From that listening, we developed five themes because that's what mattered to Euclid.”
Those themes focus on ensuring youth safety and wellbeing, building a greater sense of connection and belonging between youth and their community, how to address root causes of violence, including economic and social problems, ways to reduce trauma among youth and end the cycle of violence and how to build trust and engagement with public institutions, he said.
A sense of connectedness is a key issue that kept coming up in discussions, Turos said.
“There's something missing in the social fabric that kids don't always have a sense of belonging," she said. "What are the things that the adults in our community can do to build those connections and be a part of the protective network for these young people?”
Chupp said attendees will be split into five groups each looking at one of these themes. CWRU will use facilitators to help move the conversations forward.
"Each of these groups will come away with a vision statement, and then one priority action that they want to see happen within one year," he said.
One problem is that reaching solutions involves establishing trust between community members and institutions, which takes time, Turos said.
“Change can only happen at the pace of trust, and you can’t fast track that," she said. "So, we have to resign ourselves that it is just going to take a while to rebuild trust that took decades to erode.”
