For the past two years, an under-the-radar program in north Minneapolis has reached out to some of the city's most active gang members with the promise of job training. A marker of its success? That all 31 men who enrolled in it are still alive.
"It's working," said Will Wallace, the self-proclaimed "mom" behind the North4 program who gives thanks that he hasn't lost anyone yet to street violence.
"The kids say, 'If you give us a job, we'll leave that gang life alone.' We have proven that that's true."
With a mix of job training, part-time employment, field trips and attention from Wallace, the North4 program has sought out young men from some of the city's toughest neighborhoods.
Its members include such people as Tyron Jenkins, who said he was out "hustling" at 8 years old and was shot at age 9. Now he's burnishing his résumé after a stint at the Minnesota Department of Transportation.
The two-year federal grant that created the program will run out this spring, so its creators have opened up publicly for the first time to make the case that their funding should be renewed. They point to the lives of 31 young men who have been a part of the program thus far.
Most come from impoverished or broken homes, have had numerous friends or relatives lost to homicide, may be fathers themselves or have served time in a juvenile facility. They all claimed allegiance to one gang or another when starting the program, and all came from one of four neighborhoods -- Jordan, McKinley, Hawthorne and Folwell -- where violent crime and street gangs are common.
"If we can turn these guys around, they can become the models for the guys coming up," said Boise Jones, a senior project consultant at Emerge Community Development, a Minneapolis nonprofit group that runs North4. The men chosen for the program were the "active shooters," Jones said, the ones who were making trouble in their neighborhoods. "We're reclaiming them," he said.
