When Kyrique Mitchell walked into the blue meeting room of the Community of Change Center seven Thursdays ago, he already felt disillusioned. He didn’t want to give his all to another workshop making empty promises to prevent gun violence in the West End. 

Every week since, he’s felt grateful to be wrong. 

“They were actually asking my opinion about things, and they made me feel comfortable to speak my mind and say my suggestions,” said Mitchell, 18. 

Last week, teens from Braddock and the West End area presented proposals for violence intervention initiatives they’ll implement in their communities this summer, ranging from hosting community events to repairing basketball courts and creating civic groups. Their ideas are the culmination of each neighborhood’s participation in a seven-week workshop series that community organizations — the Helping Out Our People [HOOP] Alliance in Braddock, and West End Providing Opportunities With Effective Resources [POWER] — facilitated in partnership with a research team from the University of Pittsburgh. 

With the feedback received from the presentations, the neighborhoods are now designing plans to roll out the initiatives, each using $2,000 allocated to the community organizations by the research team. 

Mary Ohmer, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Social Work, has led the research team as part of her overall analysis of how neighborhoods build “collective efficacy.”

“Now that sounds fancy, but it means building stronger relationships among youth and adults — and their neighbors and their peers — and developing norms and values for the community around [violence] prevention and supporting youth,” Ohmer explained. 

She began hosting the collective efficacy workshops 10 years ago in Atlanta and brought the initiative to Perry Hilltop and Fineview last year, seeking input from residents to tailor the curriculum to each neighborhood. 

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