Back from the prisons on Tuesday, and then Wednesday, we focused on community responses to violence. We met with Community Alliance for Safety and Peace (CASP) members in Salinas from the city of Salinas, county of Monterey, health department, and local non-profits. We visited Rancho Cielo and spent time with the Salinas chief of police, also getting a tour of the police station.
The contrast between this small gathering of community members and city and county employees on the violence prevention side stood in obvious contrast to the immensity of the Salinas Valley State Prison, a testament to the breadth and depth of the problems our society needs to address that lead to violence. It almost makes it seem like the folks working for peace and equity are too few, that even the remarkable level of coordination they do exhibit is not enough.
Salinas mayor, Joe Gunter, had an answer to that. Or was it Jose Arreola, CASP’s director, who said this? It might have been Jose. He spoke to the incredible dedication and effort put in by the people in the room and by all the members of CASP, which we saw when we attended a meeting our first week, is a very large group. He spoke to how underrecognized it all was: while a shooting makes news, the constant work of community organizations with kids in schools – to reduce bullying, for example – does not make news. But not being on the front page does not make the work any less powerful.
The organizations working to combat violence in Salinas are helping. No, it is not enough, but that many individuals’ lives have been improved is undeniable, and we spent some of the evening considering the relative merits of various approaches, such as that of Rancho Cielo. Travis kept asking an interesting question, which is whether the organizational techniques employed by gangs had ever been considered as inspiration for violence-prevention technique, and the answer everywhere seemed to be no. The underlying logic of his question, to me, is that the response to organized violence must be equally organized and powerful. But organized violence relies on the lucrative drug trade, while organized peace relies on short-term and fickle donor funding.
We didn’t get deep into all the various ways one can build healthy communities and heal ones that are hurting – there are simply so many ways, through education and employment, advocacy, laws, community centered policing, dialogue, training, engaging, self-reflection. But we did see how two elements underlie the strength of the effort: coordination and funding. The better we can work with each other in our efforts to strengthen and heal communities, and the more reliable and sustainable our funding mechanisms, the more effective we will be.
