Editor’s Note: The following story is the second in a three-part series about Community Passageways, a community-based organization in Seattle that is spearheading efforts to curb violence and help troubled youth transition into positive and productive lifestyles.
By Kiara Doyal, The Seattle Medium
It’s 10:30 p.m. and Mark Rivers, director of community engagement and outreach with community passageways, receives a call from a distressed teen. Although he has already put in a 10-hour day, Rivers grabs his coat and keys and calls one of his colleagues to alert them of the situation at hand and where he is going. While he is never quite sure about a situation that he is about to inject himself into, he knows that he may be a key factor in whether or not a young person gets home safely or finds themselves as another statistic on the evening news.
While this scenario plays out quite frequently for Rivers and many of his colleagues at Community Passageways, a Seattle-based nonprofit with a vision for zero youth incarceration that serves young people between the ages of 12 to 30 years old, they often feel isolated in the fact that there are some in the community who do not have a full appreciation or respect the work that they do, even by those who are very familiar with their work and impact.
For Rivers, an incident that constantly stands out in his mind is when he was looking down the barrel of a gun held by a police officer when he was working on getting a group of young men, who were in the wrong neighborhood, to safety.
“I was trying to get a group of young men out of their enemy’s territory and ended up having the police ride up on me and point a gun in my face because I had them in the car, and that is something that always sticks with me,” says Rivers. “The officers then realized I was there to help, and they let me go. But police officers are fully aware [of who we are and what we do], we are everywhere, and everyone knows these neon shirts. We just want to be respected, because we are all just trying to do our part and keep the community safe.”
Dominique Davis, founder and CEO of community passageways, says that when staff like Rivers put themselves in harm’s way to deescalate situations it puts a target on their back, especially when they are pushing back against things like institutional racism and some of the racist systems that exists in society.
“Because of the demographic of people that we work with, we have been around and in the middle of some pretty violent things because we choose to place ourselves in those spaces,” says Davis. “People look at us with a target on our back because they don’t like what we do, and because we are built Black, ran Black, owned Black, everything is Black, and we’re having the successes that we’re having people put a target on our back, especially in the political realm.”
“I don’t bite my tongue for nobody, I don’t tap dance, and I don’t scratch when I don’t itch,” added Davis. “We just continue to do the work that we do for our community all hours of the day.”
In looking at the work that they do and the number of hours that they put into making our community a safer and more enjoyable space for everyone, one might wonder why. Why do they put themselves in harms way? Why do they care? And what do they hope to accomplish in what many, from the outside looking in, believe to be an uphill battle that they cannot win.
The Seattle Medium recently talked to a number of staff members from Community Passageways and discovered that despite the wide timeline when they joined the organization, they all joined for the same reason – they too were once troubled teens, and they wanted to give back to the community that embraced them when they were young and to help young people today successfully find their purpose in an unforgiving society.
While community passageways supports both young males and females, the bulk of their efforts centers around supporting Black males and their families by helping them navigate from what some may term as a “destructive lifestyle” into a productive lifestyle.
While Davis has many success stories to share, one that comes to his mind is a young man who was heavily involved in “the game” who the organization helped get back on the right path in life. According to Davis, they helped him secure housing, a successful career path, and an opportunity to put his former street life in the rearview mirror and become a productive member of our community, despite some lagging legal challenges and his name still “ringing in the streets.”
“We were able to get him into an electrician apprenticeship and got him an apartment. He was going to work every day, and he has been doing great,” says Davis. “He just got picked up on a domestic violence charge and they are trying to add some other chargers to it just because of who he is in the streets, but he is really plugged in with us, and the criminal justice system trusts our work.”
According to Davis, in this line of work, Trust is a three-way intersection where the young people they serve must trust them, they must trust the young people they are trying to help, and the criminal justice system, the political establishment and the community must trust that Community Passageways is able to deliver on their promise to make the community a better place for everyone.
Monica Johnson, the Regional Peacekeepers Restoration Services Program Manager at Community Passageways, believes the mentalities of young men involved in gun violence vary greatly. The challenge is keeping them on a positive path despite external influences.
“Almost everyone I’ve worked with wants something better for themselves,” says Johnson. “I have one young man that came to me from another program called Deep Dive, known for working with the real heavy hitters. He needed to be relocated for safety. He truly wants a better life, but many barriers, outside of his control, pull him back into the streets.”
“Some boys are very open-minded, while others have high walls that we need to break through. We do that by being patient, not giving up, and building trust, as many of these young men are used to people giving up on them,” added Ermias Ambachew of Community Passageways.
The mindset of these young men has shifted significantly compared to when Community Passageways staff were their age.
“These young men have adopted a culture of self-hate that I haven’t seen at this level before,” says Davis.
“Killing and harming each other has become normalized, and the level of carelessness is high.” He continued, “I’ve been saying it’s a demonic state of mind. At this point, I see darkness in their eyes that I didn’t see before.”
Davis has hired dedicated staff and created numerous opportunities and programs for troubled young men in our community. He believes being deeply rooted in the community has a domino effect, with most referrals coming from friends of those they help.
“If these young men are doing time, we are going to support them inside, once they get out we are going to continue to support him in different ways,” says Davis. “In our reentry program, we create a plan for each young man, and one man in particular, we have already been working on his release since the first day he walked into prison.”
“When these young men work with community passageways, we stay connected to them, and when they get out we have something for them that can help them out greatly,” added Davis.
Johnson works with families affected by gun violence, helping them recover from trauma. She serves as a mother figure for many troubled youth, providing essential services. According to Johnson, this support can extend beyond individuals to include their entire family.
“I help families get back to a better position post-trauma. Whether it’s relocating a family for safety or just being available for a phone call when someone needs to talk, it’s a wide range,” says Johnson
“We assist with safe housing, explore employment options, and provide grief and trauma counseling immediately,” she continued. “If someone passes away, our support is then lent to the family. Every case is different, but the goal is to leave no one behind.”
Des’Juan Newton, a Community Safety Ambassador on the SCSI Street Team, believes that the word accountability has been removed from the Black and brown communities, which causes the quickest way to create the school-to-prison pipeline.
“These kids can come to school high, smoke in the bathrooms, use their phones in class, and get a 30-minute in-school suspension instead of being suspended,” says Newton. “When I was growing up if you were in sixth grade, and you didn’t do your work and you got held back in sixth grade, they lit a fire up under your tail to let you know you better do it because now all your friends are in seventh grade and they’re laughing at you, and that would give a form of humility.”
Newton says that it’s important for the young people that they serve to know that Community Passageways is not here to put them down but to prepare them for real-life situations, as they may not be able to handle everything that life throws at them when they return to the real world if they don’t truly understand the meaning of accountability.
“If they don’t know how to handle everything, then it’s now the confusion, the anger, the aggression, the robbing, the stealing,” says Newton. “Now we’re going to jail, now we’re not going to college. This is all a part of the accountability that has been removed from our community.”
Johnson believes that a lot of the success that Community Passageways has had in changing the plight of young men in the community is that they are a Black-owned and operated organization that speaks the language these young men speak today, so they can understand what exactly they are trying to do.
“The greatest satisfaction is when these young men want me to support them, and when they reach back out because you know these kids will ghost you in a heartbeat,” says Johnson. “I am very raw and uncut with them. I make it clear that this is an 80/20 relationship. I am the 20, I need 80% out of you, at least, so that you can move forward and have all the things you’re telling me you want to do, and eventually they will be at 100%.”
“I had a young man say, ‘Man, I wish you were my mom’, and I said, well I can’t be your mom, but I could be your Monica,” Johnson concluded.
