“Stand up if you know someone who’s been affected by community violence,” Dr. Khalid Griffin prompted the group of Fort Wayne high schoolers.
Almost all 60 teenagers who had been seated in the center of the downtown church stood up. The teens, a predominantly Black group of students, were selected as part of a youth program that does violence prevention work with local high schools. As area business leaders, city officials, judges, and police officers watched and took notes, Griffin, an administrator for Fort Wayne Community Schools, continued.
“Stand up if you know at least one young person who has been killed,” he said. Again, the majority of the students stood up. Audience members audibly groaned and sighed as the students responded to each prompt.
“Remain standing if you know at least two young people who have been killed,” he said. No one sat down. “Remain standing if you know at least three young people who have been killed,” prompting roughly half of the students to sit down.
Finally, he declared, “Stand if you have a family member who has been killed.”
Almost every student stood up.
The exercise laid bare how many of these young people had been touched by violence, and set the tone for what organizers described as the city’s first youth-led call to action to stem shootings. The forum was a response to warnings last year by community advocates that Fort Wayne was facing unprecedented gun violence among young people — and was failing to stop it.
A week after the summit, the Fourth of July holiday weekend brought in two separate shootings on the south side which left two people dead and eight others injured. The violence emphasized the gravity of the students’ message, even as Fort Wayne has seen some signs of improvement in overall gun violence this year.
Through the end of May, the most recent data provided to The Trace, police recorded 112 shooting incidents, up from 103 during the same period last year, while the number of people actually struck by bullets has fallen from 63 to 17. This includes a drop in juvenile gunshot victims, from 13 to three.
Still, the violence continues to hit the same neighborhoods many of the students call home. Through early June, according to police data, nine of Fort Wayne’s 13 homicides happened on the city’s southeast side. Nearly 80 percent of last year’s homicide victims were Black, and most of the killings involved handguns.
The 60-odd students in attendance at the youth summit were part of Alive Community Outreach’s peacemakers program, an anti-violence leadership program for Fort Wayne public high school students. Alive worked with Fort Wayne Community Schools, which has spent the past several years expanding its school safety efforts, to schedule the youth-led forum.
For two hours, the teens spoke about their experience of regular violence. Several of them discussed harboring fear of leaving their homes because of the risk of crossfire. Others talked about how they are desensitized to violence because “it’s become our norm.”
Naima Esters, a recent graduate, said she speaks for a lot of other Fort Wayne teenagers when she referred to the pain resulting from a 2024 mass shooting at a Halloween party on the northeast side of the city. “Ten kids or 11 kids were shot, and I knew every single one of them, and it hurts to visit that many people in the hospital,” Esters said. “It hurts to visit that many people at home, seeing them with breathing tubes or seeing that they have bandages all over them.”
Throughout the summit, students discussed not only what they wanted from adults, but also the role they believed they could play in reducing violence among their peers. Some talked about setting an example for younger students, and the possibility of de-escalating the conflicts among themselves before they get violent. But they also pointed to the socioeconomic conditions they said fuel violence in their neighborhoods. “No one should be fighting for resources,” one student said. “We shouldn’t be in a position where we have to retaliate towards each other because of a lack of resources.”
Chris Felton, who oversees the gang and violence unit of the Fort Wayne Police Department, said the summit is a reflection of the approach the city is taking outside of law enforcement to prevent violence. While the department has expanded its use of crime gun intelligence and social media monitoring in the past year, Felton said preventing violence also requires building relationships with young people before they pick up a gun. “We’re never going to arrest our way out of crime,” Felton said. “We need to be working with community partners to stop kids from getting the guns or even being attracted to that lifestyle in the first place.”
But even with the improved numbers, the students made it clear that their communities don’t necessarily feel safer. “They don’t feel like they have resources; they feel left out,” said Roderick Parker, the executive director of Big Hearts Community Projects. Parker has been leading the charge for the city to create a violence intervention or prevention program and has spent the past year developing a proposal for a city-supported violence intervention program and a more structured outreach model.
Sharon Tucker, the city’s first Black mayor, said Fort Wayne has tried new ways to respond in the past year, launching a youth violence prevention initiative that awarded $125,000 in microgrants to community organizations and investing in programs aimed at reaching young people before they get their hands on a gun. She didn’t attend the summit, but representatives from her office did.
In an interview with The Trace, Tucker said “we haven’t turned our eyes or ears away” but also acknowledged the limitations of City Hall. While city officials can provide funding and create programs, she said, addressing youth violence requires parents, schools, neighborhoods, and community organizations to take responsibility. “Some things are beyond government.”
The students echoed that idea, urging parents to be more involved in their children’s lives and neighbors to be more invested in their communities.
After the summit ended, the adults, elected officials and decision-makers stayed behind, formed a circle, and reflected on everything they had heard. Whiteboards were spread around the room, on which they wrote down their reflections: “provide safe spaces,” “role model,” “remove barriers for advancing peacemaking,” and “listen to them in the systems.” Then they shared their reactions, with many expressing their admiration for the teens and their willingness to share with and challenge the older community members who were present.
“We as adults have some work to do,” Denita Washington, an administrator with Fort Wayne Community Schools, said bluntly. “Now the challenge is we become an extension of the peace they’re asking for.”
This article was written by Josiah Bates with The Trace.
