Unity Temple volunteers Madeline Van Hecke and Marsha Borders said they felt honored to hear that the Institute for Nonviolence Chicago wanted the church’s help setting up an event in Oak Park.
Both volunteers on the church’s gun violence prevention team, they said the event presented an opportunity for them to help chip away at barriers that prevent Oak Parkers from connecting with their neighbors in the Austin community, where institute staff work tirelessly to mediate conflicts, advocate for victims, prevent shootings and support at-risk people get on track with education, job opportunities, mental health care and more.
“This feels really nice, trying to create that sense of connection,” said Van Hecke, who grew up in Austin. “Oak Park can be a very isolated kind of community. It’s very liberal politically, but I’m not the only one who’s said that sometimes it’s felt like it’s in a bubble. This is one way to establish more connection — it’s one way to get out of that bubble.”
“Austin is our sister neighborhood, in Oak Park.”
Held at Austin Gardens on Friday, Sept. 12, the event invited Oak Parkers to meet with the organization’s outreach workers and other institute staffers to learn about its mission, strategy and goals. A quick chat with an institute fundraising staffer earned people a ticket to exchange for a frozen treat at an ice cream truck that the organization’s CFO Brian Ng runs on the side.
Oak Park attendees had the opportunity to meet people like Tavares Harrington, the institute’s Austin outreach supervisor. Harrington began working in street outreach for the institute after losing his niece to a homicide.
“It was like an all-out-war was going on, so I wanted to try and help the neighborhood and save some of our people,” Harrington said.
Collaborations with suburban organizations like Unity Temple provide a great opportunity to tell the organization’s story, said founder and CEO Teny Gross.
The institute was founded in 2015 by Gross, a veteran of both the Israeli Defense Force and the movement to build peace between Palestinians and Israelis who’s worked in violence prevention in U.S. cities since coming to Massachusetts as a college student in the 1980s. Gross said that the institute already has a base of support in Oak Park, but that it is important to demonstrate the work that’s being done to break cycles of violence in Chicago’s most crime-burdened communities as crime in the city is put under a national microscope.
“Research shows that an Israeli soldier is six times less likely to be killed than an African American who drops out of high school in Austin, it’s stunning,” Gross said. “One of the issues that we have is that too many people in Chicago and around Chicago don’t really think that there is a plan to solve violence. So this is a chance to educate in a friendly way, because you can’t do things in a vacuum. Unless people support what you do, it’s not sustainable.”
The Institute for Nonviolence Chicago has teams anchored in Chicago’s Austin, Brighton Park, West Garfield Park and Back of the Yards communities. The institute’s street outreach workers come from the communities they serve and often bring their own personal experiences with violence and trauma to their work responding to the scenes of shootings, visiting the hospital beds of victims and building relationships with young people in crisis.
Before coming to the event in Oak Park, Gross and his staff had been at the hospital after an outreach worker’s son was killed in a homicide.
Still, staff said that they see the impact of their work every day.
“I’ve seen our participants elevate to places they thought they couldn’t reach,” said Larrecio Gamble, an Austin case management staffer. “It’s good to see that they’re doing so well in their own lives with children and families and that they’re developing like we thought they could. I’m seeing that on a daily basis and it’s exciting to see that the growth is there and the change is there.”
Rates of gun violence have fallen steadily across Chicago this year, with the summer of 2025 being the safest one the city has seen since 1965. Some credit support for the outreach work that organizations like the institute do for driving that drop.
The homicide rate has dropped in each of the U.S.’s major cities since the country saw a historic surge in gun violence in .
Still, it’s difficult for outreach workers to pause for any celebration in light of those numbers, said Gamble.
“It’s hard to brag about helping someone change, you’re doing it naturally,” he said.
Something like a recession could put an abrupt halt to that progress, Gross said.
“I don’t want to sell those numbers,” Gross said. “If the economy tanks, if it’s true that 300,000 Black women have lost their jobs, that’s going to effect a lot of families.”
There have been 50 homicides in the Austin community over the last 12 months, down from the 83 killings in the community in 2020 and 71 it saw in 2021, according to ABC 7 Chicago. There have been 465 homicides in that span in the city as a whole, according to the station.
There have been three homicides in Oak Park since last November, all of which were fatal shootings.
Latasha Henry, an Austin native and the institute’s case management supervisor, said that Oak Park and Austin need each other to ensure sustainable safety in both communities.
“Because they might get a lot of their information on what’s going on from the news, all Oak Park might see is the impact of negativity,” she said. “So being able to build collaboration, we have an opportunity to come out and make sure that everyone knows not only what we do, but what we stand for and how we’re moving along to model that vision and that mission. Violence has an impact everywhere, so being able to come together and build community is a great thing.”
Harrington said he’d like to see the institute put on an event that brought Oak Parkers into Austin.
“We could definitely get the community to intertwine with each other, I mean we’re all living together” he said. “Violence is a disease, and we all need to stop the spread of it.”
