The Vance County Coalition Against Violence will still be searching for ways to involve youths when it holds its weekly meeting tonight.
The meeting, at 6 at the Gateway Center on Garnett Street downtown, will begin less than 45 hours after the county’s third murder of the year claimed the second victim in a demographic group the coalition is desperate to reach, people age 25 and younger.
Lajuan Wilkins, 22, died of multiple gunshot wounds in his Maple Street home about 9:30 Tuesday night.
It was the kind of incident that sparked the creation of the coalition in October, during a year in which Vance County had five homicides. While building awareness of its activities, the coalition has involved few young people. Members discussed the need to reach out to youths last week.
The group’s first Youth Speak-Out-Reach-Out didn’t touch nearly as many young people as organizers had hoped, but it may have put the coalition closer to getting a feel for those kids.
After drawing half a dozen young people to last week’s regular meeting and discussing the lack of youth involvement in the struggle against violence, the coalition decided late Thursday to hold the Speak-Out on short notice. The Daily Dispatch announced the program Saturday, and the word spread in schools.
“We wanted to get young people and let them tell us how they live,” said the Speak-Out’s main organizer, the Rev. Sheila Kingsberry-Burt. “Are they affected by crime? Is it something they even thought about? … How can they make the community a better place?”
But what was meant to be a youth rally and organizing session Monday afternoon at the Gateway Center had a single teenager 20 minutes after the scheduled 4:30 start. In the end, only five of the 20 participants were too young to smoke, drink or vote.
Kingsberry-Burt, who took the blame for arranging the session with less than four days’ notice, said she was disappointed by the turnout, “but we did accomplish something today.”
The main organizational accomplishment was to bring together three men in the 25-and-under demographic, Clyde Davis III, Kevin Burton and Jonathan Feinstein, with youth pastor John Miles in a committee that will drive the coalition’s youth outreach efforts.
The involvement of those men is significant for a group in which Kingsberry-Burt, at age 50, felt like a youngster when it began in October.
Miles, a Flint Hill native who lives in Greensboro, is a regular with the coalition and in youth organizing in Henderson. Davis also is a coalition regular and is trying to organize a youth club called Gamers Against Violence. Burton is launching a nonprofit group called Succeeders and Achievers; at his first coalition meeting last week, he volunteered to help in any way he could.
Feinstein is an eighth-grade teacher at Eaton-Johnson Middle School who tried to get students to attend Monday’s meeting. He promised, “I’ll do anything, everything, to get young people who want to be leaders in my school here.”
Leadership was a key theme Monday. Kingsberry-Burt and coalition Chairwoman Elnora O’Hara said the coalition needs to help students develop into leaders willing to speak up about the dangers they shouldn’t have to live with and wanting to show their peers that they can change things.
The youths who attended Monday’s forum — two in high school, one in middle school and two in elementary school — frustrated the parents and grandparents facing them in a circle because the kids weren’t comfortable talking.
When Kingsberry-Burt asked them at the end whether they wanted to be involved in stopping the violence in Vance County, each shrugged and mumbled, “I don’t know.”
The oldest of the five, a 17-year-old high school student brought with his 10-year-old brother by their father, barely could be persuaded to join the circle and made clear that attending the rally wasn’t his idea.
The two girls in the group, Safiya Grice, 15, and Courtney Ellis, 13, were much more talkative early in the session. But as one adult after another talked about the problems of youths and schools and families and discounted the kids’ claims that they felt safe at home and in school, even Safiya and Courtney went mute.
“It seemed like the Vance County Coalition Against Young People,” Feinstein said.
After airing their feelings about why the youths boasted of feeling safe in schools where they acknowledged seeing fights and knowing people who were shot or stabbed and feeling frustrated by teachers who don’t teach and don’t seem to care, the adults seemed to learn the evening’s lesson.
Next time it tries to rally youths to the cause, the coalition will depend on its under-25 members to spark the conversation and will keep the number of adults in the room to a minimum.
The youths “have to care about it,” Burton said. “They have to want to make a change.”
Miles plans to hold a big youth forum, and the group also discussed holding monthly half-hour sessions in the middle and high schools. Those school gatherings would involve enough kids to make them feel in charge but not so many that the group breaks into lots of side conversations.
The coalition will try to involve music, prizes and treats to encourage participation.
“You got to know how to deal with young people,” Miles said. “We got to make this be fun for them.”