BRONZEVILLE — After a weekend that left dozens wounded and three dead across the city — including an 11-year-old girl killed at a sleepover — Mayor Rahm Emanuel met with community leaders to discuss how the city can combat gun violence.
Emanuel's Monday meeting at Chicago Police Headquarters in Bronzeville focused on long-term solutions to curb violence, and he acknowledged there was not a simple solution.
"It's not one thing. It's everything," Emanuel said.
Emanuel stressed using mentoring programs to work with the community to keep young people safe, along with policing and stricter gun laws, during the portion of the closed-door meeting that was open to the media.
"The challenges did not happen overnight and we're not going to get out of this overnight," he said to 50 community leaders.
Last week, Emanuel met with students from Team Englewood Academy participating in a summer job program for a brown bag lunch. The students shared aspirations of becoming doctors, sports agents and lawyers but also that they felt they "weren't a part of our conversation as a city, that their dreams aren't part of the city," Emanuel said.
"There's a disconnect between where their lives are and unless we invest in their education, their neighborhood and their community," he said. "As one child said to me last week, 'Do people really care or think about us in Team Englewood? Are we part of that vision?'"
The conversation is deeper than law enforcement or the number of kids enrolled in mentoring programs. It's a community-wide problem that deserves a community-wide solution, he said.
"It's about where the guns are coming from, where the law enforcement is, where our neighborhoods are our communities are, where our parents are, where our investments are and what we're doing to make sure that our kids start their education early and have the values that they can get all the way through not only to graduation but on to the jobs that are coming to the city of Chicago," Emanuel said.
Supt. Garry McCarthy sat alongside the mayor during the closed conversation and told reporters after that the discussion was very progressive.
"I was actually impressed and pleased by the communities' response to the violence in Chicago. They were talking about the fact that it's everybody's problem not just a police matter. Everybody talked about things from jobs to education to giving kids hope, which we hear a lot, but in this case we started talking about how we're actually going to do that," McCarthy said.
Rev. Michael Pfleger was in the crowd during what he called an "honest, open, everything on the table conversation" where no one held back.
"The meetings I've been at for the last umpteenth months, this to me was one of the most honest meetings," Pfleger said. "We could all ask of this whole group sitting there whatever questions we wanted to ask.
"Often times you feel like you're being talked at or you're being told all the great things that are being done and that's good and it's important to know that, but you never get to come back and say what you feel needs to be or should be done," Pfleger said.
"But what I think was great afterwards was the ability to say, 'OK, now whatever challenges, whatever questions, whatever thoughts, whatever feelings, whatever we're not doing that we need to do more,' [There's an] open floor. It was refreshing," Pfleger said.
The mayor also announced Monday that the city of Chicago, Chicago Public Schools and the University of Chicago Crime Lab and Urban Education Lab will receive $10 million in new funding to support the expansion of the Becoming a Man (BAM) program and Match program. The BAM program, which offers mentoring and cognitive behavioral therapy to at-risk youths, and Match program, an individualized math tutoring program for at-risk youth, will also be studied for possible use in other cities.
“Through this investment, BAM and Match, which have grown substantially in just a few years, will be providing thousands of Chicago’s children with a high-quality educational experience, an alternative to the street and the opportunity for a bright future that every child deserves," Emanuel said.
Funding for the project was made possible through President Barack Obama's My Brother's Keeper Initiative. CPS will receive $4 million in federal Title I funding and a $6 million grant from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health will go towards BAM, Match and a large-scale study to expand the program.
“President Obama’s strong investment will amplify the City, Chicago Public Schools, and the philanthropic sector’s support for the Becoming A Man mentoring and counseling program and the Match tutoring program to more students at more schools in neighborhoods throughout our city,” said Emanuel.
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