Summer is here, and that means our RISE team is out in the community, addressing intimate partner and gun violence by creating safe spaces for healing and wellness.
Quiet parks come back to life, the familiar jingle of the ice cream truck echoes through city streets, and kids laugh and play outside, undeterred by the hot rays of the sun. It’s unmistakably summer.
In their signature orange shirts, our RISE team, too, is out and about—talking to residents, setting up tables in parks and plazas, and bringing a message of peace and healing to the community.
In many neighborhoods in New York City and elsewhere, the warmer months are greeted with a mix of excitement and anxiety. For a number of reasons, gun violence tends to spike in the summertime, as does intimate partner violence. For our RISE team, which works at the intersection of those two issues, it’s a busy time of year.
“In June, we’re outside,” says Heaven Berhane, who oversees the RISE Project. An acronym for “Reimagining Intimacy through Social Engagement,” RISE works alongside residents and other anti-violence groups in New York City’s Crisis Management System to put an end to intimate partner and gun violence by creating unique, holistic safe spaces for the communities most impacted.
Those safe spaces come in many forms: open mics for survivors to share their stories, wellness events at the park, barbershop talks centered on loving relationships and healthier visions of masculinity. Wherever they go, our RISE team raises awareness about the link between relationship violence and gun violence, a link that was acknowledged in a recent Supreme Court decision barring people with a history of intimate partner violence from owning a firearm. But they also have another purpose, especially during Gun Violence Awareness Month: to remember those in the community who have been lost.
“The work that we’re doing in June is really in honor of them,” says Berhane.
That intention was at the heart of the Revive, Thrive, ‘n’ Vibe block party in the Bronx, where our RISE, Save Our Streets, and Bronx Community Justice Center teams hosted a wellness fair for young people to learn about the impacts of gun violence while enjoying food, music, self-care, and connections to local resources. They also joined conversations with RISE’s therapeutic team to unpack what healthy and unhealthy relationship dynamics look like.
The event culminated in a healing activity called “Let Go and Grow” created by members of RISE’s Youth Leadership Collective, who spent weeks learning about and discussing intimate partner violence and healthy relationships. Attendees wrote something they would like to let go of down on a strip of soluble paper and placed it in water to watch it dissolve. Then they moved onto the next station to plant a plant, symbolizing something they want to grow. The activity embodied a core lesson young people took to heart in the Leadership Collective: in order to care for others in a loving relationship, we must first learn to care for ourselves.
At another recent event in collaboration with Street Corner Resources, fathers, father figures, and boys gathered in Harlem for a discussion circle to talk through their experiences with grief and loss, some of them due to gun violence. “Fathers’ grief can often be quieter,” says Berhane, “or it can show up in different forms.” The circle provided a space for processing that grief—and exploring what it means to heal—for people who often struggle to find an outlet for those experiences due to living in a state of hypervigilance.
Building a future without violence calls for the hard work of education, changing norms, and creating holistic spaces for healing, especially for our young people. It is by working towards that future that we honor those who have been lost.