"Looking for hope"

Town Hall Forum addresses community concerns about violence

Story and photos by MARGIE O’LOUGHLIN

Minneapolis City Council members Cam Gordon, Alondra Cano and Elizabeth Glidden hosted a Town Hall Forum at Plaza Verde on July 26. An estimated 150 community members turned up for the two-hour listening and visioning session. Also in attendance were legislators Karen Clark and Ray Dehn, representatives from the Minneapolis Mayor’s Office, the Police Conduct Oversight Committee, and the Office of Youth Violence Prevention.

Photo right: An estimated 150 people gathered for a Town Hall Forum at Plaza Verde to talk about community violence.

Sharon Day, executive director of the Indigenous Women’s Task Force, opened the evening with a song from the Ojibwe tradition. While she sang and drummed, Marianne Queres turned to the four corners of the room holding a smudge of sweet grass to clear the space.

Participants were then invited to share their perceptions of violence in the Twin Cities. Several long-time Minneapolis residents expressed despair that the level of violence experienced in the mid-1990s, when Minneapolis was known nationally as Murderapolis, has returned.

Photo left: Junauda Petrus read from her poem celebrating the strength of grandmothers; behind her council members Cam Gordon (Ward 2), and Alondra Cano (Ward 9) listened. 

Happy Reynolds, a practicing physician, said, “I worry about how unmet mental health needs are destroying our city.”

Charles Brickman, speaking through tears about his gang background, said, “I want to make a change. I can’t live like this anymore, wondering if my mother is going to get shot on her way home from work tonight.”

Laverne Turner, a hard-working father of three, said, “A lot of our youth don’t have any direction, and there’s nobody checking up on them. I want to see the city invest more in the youth here, with better programming in our parks and schools.”

Before break-away sessions formed to talk about possible action steps, several people wondered out loud what would come of the night’s conversation. It seemed that many of them had been in these kinds of listening sessions before.

Photo right: An audience member said, “If kids don’t have hope – they shoot, they steal. They need to know they have a reasonable chance of passing through the education system. They need to see their parents earn a living wage, and to know that one day they can too. All of these issues are interconnected. Everybody’s looking for hope.”

Cam Gordon, City Councilman for Ward 2 (which includes much of greater Longfellow) said in a telephone interview two weeks later, “I wish we could come out of these meetings with one or two solid ideas…then the politicians could move forward to implement those ideas, and we would see violence go down as a direct result–-but it’s not as easy as that.”

“This meeting gave community members a chance to hear each other’s stories and to get to know each other better,” Gordon said. “It’s part of how council members stay connected to their constituents too—by hearing very directly what their thoughts and concerns are. I’ll take these stories forward in my work around public safety and racial justice.”