Jermaine is a laidback and confident young man. He’s only 14 years old, but he already has full plans for his future. He wants to be a real estate agent to take care of his family, but that all depends on how he deals with the present.
“I can see me and I see my future self being rich, buying my mom a house,” Jermaine said while speaking with his mentor. “[I can] get my little brothers what they want. I'm trying to go crazy. I want to be there for my family.”
Jermaine is a justice-impacted mentee, as he and other family members have been to jail. At the court's request, he joined the Serving Our Streets program — a violence prevention program run by the Lorain County Urban League.
His mentor and namesake, Jermaine Johnson, said he’s formed a real connection with his mentee. Johnson himself was in and out of juvenile detention centers and spent eight years in prison. Now, he feels he’s uniquely equipped to inspire other young people away from the mistakes he made.
“I tell him it's the difference of someone talking to you, wearing a suit and tie, and [has] never walked a mile in your shoes,” Johnson said. “I have, you know.”
Since starting the program a year ago, Johnson sees a big change in Jermaine’s behavior and demeanor.
“There was a time he would come here, he wouldn't speak to nobody,” Johnson said. “I had to force him to speak. But now I'm starting to see him speak, and I'm starting to see him express himself a little more. Still got his ways, but I see growth.”
How Serving Our Streets began
The program is a collaboration between community members, local governments and nonprofits like the Lorain County Urban League. It began after an uptick in crime and violence by young people during the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead of incarcerating more young people, Serving Our Streets embraces members of the community and looks to provide resources to fix their lives and help them make the right choices.
Parris Smith, president and CEO of the Lorain County Urban League, said starting the program was a chance to try a different approach to preventing gun violence. The Urban League modeled their program after Cure Violence Global, a violence interruption program that started in Chicago’s West Garfield Park and spread to other cities. In Baltimore, researchers said the program contributed to a 23% reduction in nonfatal shootings between 2003 and 2022.
“We wanted to teach our community that violence was a public health issue,” Smith said. “Sometimes we see people shooting each other, or we see crime increasing in certain neighborhoods in the city, but it really wraps around the social determinants of health.”
The Serving Our Streets program takes a public health approach to address the community’s gun violence problems. After a needs assessment, violence interrupters are assigned to individual students to provide social and economic resources and conflict resolution tactics.
Damian Calvert is a justice-impacted violence interrupter with Serving Our Streets. While in prison, he learned how different social factors — like education, housing and income — can lead young, disadvantaged people toward violence.
“While incarcerated, particularly about the last decade of my incarceration, I started learning a lot about trauma and how trauma shaped me,” Calvert said. “In that type of understanding and in harvesting those lessons and applying them in there, it gave me a larger vision of how to apply out here post-incarceration.”
Gun violence in Lorain and Ohio
Gun violence is a growing problem in Lorain County. Lorain High School has been placed on lockdown twice this school year alone due to concerns about safety and gun violence.
Ohio is one of the deadliest states in the union when it comes to gun violence. There were more than 1,800 gun deaths in Ohio back in 2022, according to research from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The overall gun death rate has risen in the last decade, as more than 700 were deemed homicides, the 11th highest gun homicide rate in the country.
This issue is compounded by race; 41% of young Black men ages 15-34 were killed by gun violence, making Black men 30 times more likely to die from gun violence compared to their white counterparts. Latino and Hispanic people are three times more likely to die by gun violence than their white counterparts.
Smith said parents have told her that without this program, they would have been at the end of their ropes.
“I don't know what it's like to be at your last point of saying, ‘I don't know what to do with my own child, and I don't know, is it safe for you to live with me,’” Smith said. “‘I'm stressed out. I'm sick, I'm hurting, I'm losing time. I'm losing sleep. I'm losing time at work because I'm trying to figure out what's going on with you. And I don't want to give up, but I'm at the point of giving up.’”
Giving back to the community
Mentees and mentors also focus on ways to give back to their community. The program hosts community events like local cleanups and block parties to promote a sense of unity, and to show the greater community that the Serving Our Streets program is active. The interrupters are also at crime scenes to support families and help people process their emotions.
This outreach work can help young adults find purpose, Calvert said.
“One of the worst things that can happen with people who are justice-impacted is to be involved in some work that doesn't bring them alive or does not allow them to tap the lived experience to have some type of impact within the community,” Calvert said. “That's like you're doing time all over again and that's not what you want. That's not good for the community.”
The program is funded until June 2025, and the nonprofit is looking for new partners to continue the program. However, Smith said the Lorain County Urban League is committed to preventing gun violence in their community, no matter the cost.
“These are our young adults,” Smith said. “These are our students. These are our kids and these are our streets. If we take the time to stand up and think through these processes of how we help them, instead of just writing them off, we can go a long way.”
