The Education Policy Fellowship Program (EPFP™) is a nationally recognized fellowship program that since 1964 has engaged a diverse and collaborative community of strategic leaders to promote equitable education policy. As part of the program, EPFP fellows were asked to write a policy paper. Joe Robertson is a member of the EPFP Class of 2021 and a LINC staff member.

By Joe Robertson

I spent the last two years in a 34-year journalism career wedged in the deepest pain of Kansas City’s violence.

My primary task was telling the stories of homicide victims for The Kansas City Star. I sat with parents at kitchen tables looking through pictures. I stood on porches with friends, listening, building each life’s unique narrative. I attended funerals. I visited graves. It was important, life-affirming work.

And, each time, I stood helpless with the families at the terminus of violence’s relentless cycle.

A career change has since led me back to the work of schools and community building which I witnessed for a large part of my journalism career as an education reporter. Now that I’m part of the Local Investment Commission’s team in Kansas City, I’m working alongside the passionate people at LINC and their school and neighborhood partners — standing not at the end, but in the vibrant heart of life’s cycles where there is a chance to reset the course of violence.

I believe we all know who truly has to make this happen — and it’s not us.

As a place-holder name, I’m calling for a new generation of “peace ambassadors.”

But I expect that the young people who are going to lead us — tweens, teenagers and 20-somethings — will give this campaign their own name. Their own power.

We have our role. We need to engage young people in the work of peace. We need to stoke their confidence and layer skills on top of their innate spirit for justice that they can deploy when they are outside of the authority figures in schools and churches — in their own circles, where real influence plays.

There are ways we can support the work of ambitious people like Marva Moses, who is changing the lives of teens at the Hope Hangout, emboldening a youthful array of violence “interrupters” in Hickman Mills.

We can apply the wisdom gained in research by people like Tufts University Medical School professor Robert Sege and Bezos Family Foundation science officer Ellen Galinsky, who tell us how children darkened by trauma can rise with hope and courage when they are the change-makers, when they are given the open door to engage their community.

They take action. And action heals.

“When you see the results of what you do,” Sege said, “the sense of engagement is powerful.”

“We know it can work,” says Dr. Lateshia Woodley, executive director of student support for the Kansas City Public Schools. As a principal in Georgia, her school trained teams of student community health workers to be positive influencers.

At KCPS, the district is building capacity with its staff and with students for restorative justice practices. She agrees that with sustained focus and resources we absolutely can prepare young people to take this mission community wide.

Their message can take down violence the way the youth-powered anti-smoking campaign took down tobacco.

Here’s the reality: The Kansas City community is staring down a long, hard road.

Dr. Rex Archer, the longtime director of the Kansas City Health Department, once sketched an x and a y axis for me while describing our abiding public health problem of violence.

The horizontal line, marking the justice system, stretched from punishment and revenge on the left to restorative justice on the right. The vertical line, marking how individuals react to violence, stretched from non-violent conflict resolution at the top to violence, fear and intimidation at the bottom.

Too many young people, Archer said, especially young men, grow up in the dangerous quadrant of anger and revenge. Violence, he said, clusters and spreads like a disease.

The “other devil,” says Moses in Hickman Mills, is social media. People fire up anger and jealousy. Taunting posts “draw you out,” she said, and your “followers” goad retaliation.

The deadliest ingredient, of course, is the shocking availability of guns.

We are overrun, and that is why, University of Missouri-Kansas City Criminal Justice Professor Ken Novak suggested in The Kansas City Star, we should be “thinking of the next generation.”

“Not to completely give up at this point,” he said, “but the best time to plant a tree is 10 years ago. The second-best time is today.”

The first step, Moses says, is to help every child see the “gem” that they are. “If I don’t feel personhood in myself,” she said, “I don’t see personhood in others.”

At the outset, we can turn to the trusted youth in our communities and bring them in alongside the work of adults in our various missions for peace. We can raise up those leaders to give voice to the work that other young people will hear.

But this campaign has to pass from us into their hands. Young people don’t realize their power when adults shelter them and tell them what to do, Sege and Galinsky say.

“Let them come up with a plan,” Galinsky said. Let them build and lead a citywide campaign. Believe that every child has an innate and unlimited capacity of human spirit.

Our children grow up inside that first circle of grownups in their lives, Moses said. And that circle is often fractured — love shadowed by fear, peace laced with anger. And guns. That insidious netherworld of guns within their reach.

But in his or her heart, Moses said, every young person “really wants a safe option.”

“We seldom offer it to them.”

Young people need to believe in safe choices. We need them to be able to stand courageously and gracefully in that space where life’s frictions electrify hot youthful emotion. We need them when it really matters — when we’re not there.

In our schools, our community groups, our leadership councils and our homes, we need to promote children, teens and young adults to this daring work. Give them choice. Give them power. Give them love.