Cities United and MONSE work to reduce gun violence in Toledo

Cities United and the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement have created a five-year plan to reduce gun violence in Toledo.

Over the last 11 months, Malcolm Cunningham, director of MONSE, and Anthony Smith, executive director of Cities United, embarked upon a series of neighborhood meetings to build the plan to address violence in Toledo.

“We arrived at a number of recommendations that we believe will help to move the city forward to a more peaceful and more just community,” Mr. Cunningham said.

The plan, called Peace in Motion, mostly focuses on intervention and outreach to at-risk individuals before violence occurs.

“We spent a lot of time thinking through how to position Toledo to implement a system-wide approach to achieve true public safety,” Mr. Smith said. “The plan will help Toledo build a system where we can identify, engage, and support those who are at risk.”

A comprehensive public safety plan was developed with a long-term vision that includes goals and action steps to achieve the vision of reducing gun violence. It’s developed with key partners from the community, government, philanthropy, business, and those who have been most impacted by violence, Mr. Smith said.

Mr. Cunningham said the participation of stakeholders who have experience with gun violence in developing the plan was invaluable.

“I feel good about their recommendations because they have contributed so much of their experiences and expertise to this process,” he said.

Key strategies of the plan include increasing protective factors, building community capacity for violence prevention, addressing the role of social media in violent conflicts, and providing comprehensive support for victims and survivors of gun violence.

It also emphasizes the importance of aligning efforts with broader social issues of health and safety, such as economic opportunity and neighborhood development.

“We have to think about some of the protective factors that come with a nice job, that come with becoming a homeowner with a sense of neighborhood pride,” Mr. Cunningham said. “We want to increase the number of people from our core neighborhoods employed in living wage jobs.”

He hopes to have youths getting job interviews for urban beautification next year.

“We supported a grant application one of our partners went after. Urban beautification signed on. DEI and public utilities signed on. We plan to have some guaranteed interviews at the very least for some of those urban beautification jobs doing shadowing and coaching with the folks that are cleaning up our streets, doing the block-by-block cleanups. The youths would be getting the skill set and support they need so when it’s time to transition to a living wage job, there’s a pathway for them.”

Another recommendation in the plan is to establish hospital-based violence intervention focused on individuals, households, and networks experiencing violent injuries that result in hospital admission.

“When you’re in trauma and at a bedside, there’s an opportunity for intervention if the right resources are there for them,” Mr. Cunningham said. “These programs exist across the country. They are evidence based. They work. We’d like to see this happen at the highest-volume trauma centers. We consider this a very critical piece moving all this forward.”

He would also like to strengthen the year-old violence interrupter program in the schools, which he said has been very successful. There are currently 11 interrupters in the schools. He plans to increase that number to 16 next year.

Joshua Davies, the school-based commissioner for Save Our Community, said the program is at Woodward, Scott, and Waite high schools in the Toledo Public School system and at the Maritime Academy. Each of the schools has interrupters and outreach specialists who work closely with students at risk of experiencing gun violence. The staff is trained at remediation to de-escalate conflict. SOC works with students to develop skills to resolve conflict before it explodes into violence.

“We see, like the rest of the country, that social media and online conflict are serving as huge drivers of community violence,” Mr. Davies said. “How can we engage in social networks that exist online that help people feel more supported and interrupt those cycles of violence, whether they take place on a screen or on the streets?”