Why we wrote this article:
After more than a dozen young people were injured by bullets and cars at 3 a.m. on a Monday, our newsroom — and the community — had a lot of questions about what led these kids to be gathered late at night in a school parking lot.
We started making calls to community organizations to find out what services are offered to keep young people out of trouble. In doing so, we learned about Akron’s Youth Violence Intervention & Prevention Strategic Plan. It gave millions of dollars of federal funding to dozens of groups that were trying to help kids make good choices. And research showed that those efforts worked.
We thought readers might want to know more about the type of programs that exist, the work that they do and how they’ve been received in the city — as well as what resources they need to continue to bring down incidents of violence.
Roché Kirk isn’t tempted by open gyms — that’s a “boy thing” — but at the Ed Davis Community Center tonight, she can also get her nails done. There will be food, giveaways and a DJ. She thinks she’ll go, and bring some friends.
Roché, who will be a senior at Ellet Community Learning Center this fall, said she wouldn’t have known about the Connect at the Rec program if she wasn’t interning this summer in the City of Akron’s human resources department.
In the aftermath of a shooting last week at Mason CLC, she wants a place to have fun that isn’t dangerous.
Roché knows people who were at the late-night gathering, including one of the five shooting victims between the ages of 14 and 20. Ten others were hit by vehicles as people fled the school parking lot.
Roché, 16, wasn’t out that night, but she could have been.
“If you’re online, you see your friends out there, having fun,” she said. “It’s hard, to see everybody else do it.”
What to do about incidents like the one at Mason, and how to prevent young people from being in harm’s way, has been an ongoing discussion in Akron. On Wednesday, the City of Akron announced $100,000 in sports and wellness grants to 49 organizations that seek to mentor students, provide after-school activities and teach life skills, part of a push to curb gun violence.
That follows a Monday press conference where the 100 Black Men of Akron called for “tangible action” on youth violence. Later that night, Akron school board members asked what kids are doing on the street and how more families could be engaged in solutions.
“What can everyone, collectively, come together to do?” Board of Education President Carla Jackson asked members. “We do have work to do, and we can do it together.”
Akron is funding violence-prevention programs
There are already a number of people, and programs, designed to help young people make good decisions.
The City of Akron’s 2023 Youth Violence Intervention & Prevention Strategic Plan focuses on 13- to 24-year-olds. It seeks to reduce the number of violent crimes committed by people in that age range by 10% by 2028 through mentorship, employment, recreation programs and other means.
The city has put millions of dollars of American Rescue Plan Act funds into grants to more than three dozen organizations to help reduce youth recidivism, improve gun safety education and create safe spaces where young people can spend time outside of school hours, among other priorities.
In addition to the $100,000 in sports and wellness grants meant to help offset the costs of programs and fees, the city is also putting $100,000 toward renovating community centers to add eSports gaming rooms. The first will be at the Joy Park Community Center.
Mayor Shammas Malik, who recounted seeing blood on the sidewalk when he visited Mason CLC after the shooting, said Wednesday that it can be easy to feel helpless. But he said there are a lot of people — government, police, parents, youth among them — who are working to improve the situation.
“It’s easy to say, ‘How do we solve a problem like that?’” Malik said. “The hopelessness, it goes away when I look at the people here doing the work.”
Millions Akron spent on violence prevention worked
The city’s grant-funded efforts have been successful, said Allyson Drinkard, the lead evaluator for the strategic plan and a research scientist for the Summit Education Initiative. But Drinkard said the ARPA money, which was available from 2022 to 2024, no longer exists.
Drinkard has been evaluating the programs that received money from the city and said there’s no doubt that those Akron helped fund are aligned with best practices for this kind of outreach. That means direct contact with children and their families to connect them with services.
“The issue is that they need money,” she said. “They already have access, training, education. They need the resources.”
Youth violence intervention programs are already fighting an uphill battle, said Ron Kent, a program coach with Youth Success Summit. More than 6,500 young people were served with existing programs, Kent said, but the biggest group was elementary school students. There was a drop-off when students hit middle school and were old enough to stay home alone.
There’s a need for more volunteers and mentors, as well as more money to support staff. Federal cuts like the freezing of Department of Education money that covers Akron After School programs and others only make it harder.
“A lack of investment now just means adults who don’t care later in life,” Kent said. “Society crumbles more. We just have a choice to make.”
Federal funding, and funding in general, is a challenge
Giving grants to small organizations has helped increase collaboration between legacy and grassroots groups, said Akron Youth Opportunity Strategist Denico Buckley-Knight. The ARPA money allowed the city to increase spending on violence intervention, but federal funding cuts in the current administration mean the gaps could become bigger.
Buckley-Knight said he hopes to find grant funds to help continue some of the efforts, while Malik said finding funding for the next few years will be challenging.
There’s a high level of need in the community, Drinkard said, and not enough money to support the groups that are doing the work. But there is research that shows when money is dispersed broadly, the rate of arrests goes down.
“I really believe that the city of Akron has the right organizations available in it,” she said. “This is a strong program. These are the right organizations; they’re doing the right things. The fact that they lack funding is a punch in the gut.”
Shooting ‘scary on a lot of levels’
The Mason CLC incident was likely a one-off situation that highlights bad choices, Buckley-Knight said. But Roché, the student, said similar incidents happen periodically — like an October 2024 shooting that killed an 18-year-old and injured two other teens at a house party.
“Something happens like this to make everyone stay home for a while,” Roché said.
She goes out sometimes, but tries to be home by midnight — sometimes, 1 a.m. The people who were involved in last week’s incident were out far later.
Akron has a curfew of 11 p.m. for people under the age of 18, with some exceptions. But no one called about the Mason CLC group until shots were fired.
Rev. James Talbert, the lead pastor at Citizens Akron Church, was at home when the shooting began. He lives by the back exit of Mason CLC and said he loves the Middlebury neighborhood and his home there. It’s usually a vibrant place.
But that Monday, he said, was “scary on a lot of levels.”
“It was terrible to hear all those rounds, all those shots,” he said. “It was really difficult. It was really hard.”
Talbert said he saw some of the kids he knows from church or the Vincent House, but plenty he doesn’t.
“As a parent, you ask questions around, why are all these kids out at 3 o’clock in the morning? Why is it OK?” he said.
The Vincent House provides after-school care and support for families, including summer bible camps, dance camps and Friday recreation nights for middle school and high school students. Dan Kamwesa, its executive director, also lives in Middlebury. He said The Vincent House aims to help young people make better choices than to be in school parking lots at 3 a.m.
But Kamwesa also said he does not want to demonize or criminalize the students who were there.
“I remember myself as a high schooler or somebody in college, like yeah, we wanted to be out at 2, 3 a.m. just like, doing stuff, right?” he said.
Kamwesa said there are some teenagers who are just trying to be teenagers, but some who “kind of ruin it for everybody.”
The Vincent House serves hundreds of kids every week, Talbert said. The area isn’t devoid of services that can help prevent violence. But funding, particularly for credible messengers who are best able to reach kids, remains an issue.
“I don’t think there’s a silver-bullet answer,” Talbert said. “We’re not going to program stuff at 3 in the morning. It’s the mentoring spaces we create. They see those things happening and they don’t want to run outside and be a part of it.”
Recreation helps kids stay safe
Roché wants to gather with her friends in a safe space — “But not too safe.”
What she doesn’t want to see: More adults than kids, events that end too early, places where she doesn’t feel as though she’s being listened to. And she wants options that are about more than just sports. If it’s just an open gym, she said, she won’t go.
But the Connect at the Rec program on several Friday nights this summer at the Ed Davis and Joy Park community centers, with arts and crafts and beauty services? She’s intrigued.
“I feel like there’s enough to do; there’s not enough marketing to get it out there,” Roché said. “I never hear about these things.”
Nearly 90 sixth through 12th graders came to last week’s event, said Robert Dowdell, the recreation supervisor at Ed Davis. Malik said it was “so cool to see” the energy.
Giving young people supervised places to be and activities to occupy them is one of the things that can help them make better choices, said Drinkard, with the Summit Education Initiative.
“We are not going to punish our way out of this,” Drinkard said.
Instead, she said, the focus needs to be on helping them find mentors or other trusted adults, on practicing restorative justice to deal with their trauma, or on giving them other ways to spend their time.
“Kids are going to be out doing stuff,” she said. “These kids have lives beyond 7 p.m. We need to give them something positive to do. We need to give them somewhere to gather.”
Skateboarding, mentoring and other programs
That’s part of the goal of First Glance Student Center Inc. on Kenmore Boulevard, where the executive director, Jessica Swiger, said Thursday rec nights that end at 9 p.m., Monday and Tuesday skateboarding that goes until 10 p.m. and small-group mentorship programs on other nights can give students a positive space to hang out with friends.
Swiger said she can get as many as 100 young people, ranging from sixth grade to 19 years old, on a Thursday night. There’s music, ice cream and adults who are trained to diffuse situations and mediate disputes between teenagers.
“We want them to gather, we just want them to stay safe,” Swiger said. “If there’s a fight, they’re out for a month. If they talk about fighting, they’re out for two weeks.”
First Glance also has after-school or camp programs for younger children; Swiger said it’s important to talk to kids early about nonviolence. Students need to know that there’s someone they can go to, that there’s someone in their corner.
In Summit Lake, Students With A Goal has expanded from academic to peer mentoring to help students learn life skills and manage mental health issues. Executive Director Richard Gibson said that, in addition to academic mentoring, he wants to teach accountability.
“In order to improve the relationship among our students, we are giving them something that is tangible,” Gibson said. “We are having them do things that show that they can see an impact within their community.”
On Thursday, students were making noodles from scratch to put into chicken noodle soup as part of a SWAG program at Goss Memorial Church in Kenmore. Gibson said SWAG has been incorporating culinary skills into its programming to give students who often shoulder heavy burdens at home more skills.
“Some of these students are helping to raise families,” he said. “So there needs to be more opportunities, workforce development, leadership development, as well as more life skills development.”
Mentorship makes a difference for young adults
Marcus Bentley and Rob D. Deck can be the people young adults turn to. Bentley, the CEO and founder of Learning Abilities for Victory + Achievement, and Deck, the vice president of programming for 100 Black Men of Akron, estimated that they’ve each mentored more than 100 kids.
“You’re a mentor for life; it never stops,” Deck said.
Anyone who is successful has plenty of mentors around them, said Kent, with Youth Success Summit.
Some adults are afraid to engage with this generation of young people, Kent said — they grew up doomscrolling, with different childhood experiences that can make it feel difficult to connect. But Kent said that continued support from adults is what teens need in order to build trust. Kids respond to genuineness and love, he said. That’s what helps young people listen when adults say it’s better to be asleep at 2 a.m.
At the Indian River Juvenile Correction Facility in Massillon, Deck helps young people come up with goals, define their interests and consider what they might want to accomplish. He helps them overcome some of the traumas in their upbringing. Both Deck and Bentley said young people tell them they look forward to the mentors’ visits.
It’s easier if he can catch them early, Deck said. But the mentors can’t reach everyone. One of Bentley’s mentees shot and killed one of Deck’s, the men said. It bothers both of them.
“They’re not bad kids,” Bentley said. “They’re misguided and misled kids.”
There’s a wide range of what works to help get or keep people on the right path, the men said: Constructive criticism, encouragement, rewards, a listening ear.
Better enforcement of existing curfews might also make a difference, Deck said. So might showing kids examples of what they can strive for, Bentley said — particularly in Black communities, where examples of Black-run businesses can give young people something to aspire to.
“They just want to be loved, that’s it,” Deck said.
A parent’s perspective
But Alice Clark thinks some kids might need stricter handling. When Clark’s son was 13, he developed a new hobby: Stealing cars.
She knows of at least seven incidents, several of which landed her son in custody. Once, he stole her car and she had to use a rideshare. Another time, he stole, and wrecked, his older brother’s vehicle.
Clark has two older sons, 27 and 25, but it’s the now-17-year-old who challenged her the most.
The teen would leave in the middle of the night when Clark was at work or asleep. His antics led her Cuyahoga Falls landlord to not renew her lease. And random visits from probation officers made Clark late to work often enough that she lost her desk job at a real estate company. She’s now working as a home health aid and living in Akron.
“I went to every parenting class that they offered me,” Clark said. “I did put restrictions on him. I even threatened to put him out, even though legally, they said I couldn’t.”
Clark’s son is done stealing cars, but she wishes that, after his second apprehension, he would have had at least an overnight stay in juvenile detention. Something that showed him real consequences might have changed his ways, she said.
Instead, she said, he got gift cards from probation officers for showing good behavior or going to school.
Clark said she thinks parents should be responsible for their children. But she also knows firsthand that kids can’t always be controlled, even with attentive parents.
“My 17-year-old just wanted to be on the go,” Clark said.
Planting seeds to disrupt paths to violence
Darchaun Ewing has to navigate his own children’s desire to be out at parties with friends. Ewing, the outreach program director at Hope and Elevation Behavioral Health, said it’s been easier since they’ve had lived experiences of what could go wrong. His 16-year-old daughter was at the Halloween party last October where a teenager was killed.
“I let her go,” Ewing said. “I carry that trauma. It’s my choice, and she’ll carry that trauma for the rest of her life. It’s confirmation that she cannot go everywhere.”
Ewing was raised by his great-grandparents and said there was little they could do to control him when he was a teenager and they were in their 80s. He lived a life of drugs and violence and went to prison.
It wasn’t until he was in his late 20s that something just clicked, and he matured. He had been dealing with the trauma of not having his parents, he said, and trauma can help people make bad decisions.
“No one ever grabbed me and told me this was not the route to go,” he said.
At the same time, there were mentors and relatives, including his great-grandparents, who showed him love. Ewing said it was like a seed that was planted but needed time to grow. He hopes to help plant those seeds himself, and he said more counselors and behavioral health opportunities can help disrupt violence before it escalates.
Investing to help young people make good choices
Helping kids get jobs can also make a difference, said Robert DeJournett, the president and CEO of the Black Chamber of Commerce — Summit County. DeJournett said if young people have economic stability, it can help reduce violence.
The City of Akron has hired more than 40 interns, paying 16- to 18-year-old students like Roché $15 an hour to work 20 hours a week.
“I think we’ve got to create those opportunities,” DeJournett said. “It’s got to be good-paying jobs that’s going to lead to a career. … I think if they had meaningful employment, they wouldn’t be out at 3 a.m.”
Regardless of how teens and young adults spend their time — work, mentorship, sports, camps — Kent, with Youth Success Summit, said what’s most important is that they’re doing something that will nourish them. It may take years of effort, and a lot of investment of time and dollars, but the end result can be young people who make good choices.
“In general, I have this firm belief that if kids are engaged well with their hearts and minds and bodies during the day, they’ll sleep at night,” Kent said. “It’s a crazy idea. So crazy, it might just work.”
Staff reporters Reegan Davis Saunders, Ryan Loew, Andrew Keiper and Doug Brown contributed to this story.