Tombstones and hearts: Ossco Bolton cuts a path through the hard work of caring communities

Come on up, Ossco Bolton said, urging his LINC audience. Think about someone who is most important to you. Someone most dear.

Slowly some came, one by one, to write a name with a marker on the board.

Pam . . . Gwen . . . Dr. A . . . JoeJoe . . .

One staffer insisted on writing two names — two children. No, no, others say, laughing, the rule is one name.

Bolton allows both names. Then says:

“You’re not going to think it’s so cute when you see what I do next.”

A training session for LINC’s Caring Communities teams, which had already dug into the realities of working with children and families, was about to strike to the core.

Without a word, everyone watched as Bolton silently went to each name and circled one after the other with a tombstone. Then he turned to face his audience.

“What if,” he said, “you knew your person had five minutes to live?

“What would you tell them?”

At first, no one offers. After a moment, Bolton begins to draw some answers out. They come in parsed, difficult words.

I love you? . . . I’m sorry . . . I wish we could trade places . . . I’ll do anything I can to ease your pain . . .

Some of the words come through cracked voices, trembling lips. Tears well in some of their eyes.

They know what Bolton is getting at. This is what it means to be a caring community here in Kansas City, where 183 people died of homicide in 2023, many of them 18 and younger; here, where in 2024, by early August, 90 more have died.

“You all feel it,” Bolton says. “This is what the people coming to you are going through.”

They feel it in the layers of the communities they serve — that violence and all its pain and loss are touching the lives of many of the children in their classrooms.

“And most of these young people,” Bolton said, “don’t get the five minutes.”

For several hours, Bolton put the LINC staff through some of the same exercises and lessons that he created to work with young men and women who are either caught up in violence or surrounded and vulnerable. This is the work of his organization, P.O.S.S.E. — Peers Organized to Support Student Excellence.

Bolton and his audience work to understand what is important to many youths and why. He talks of the masks youth create for survival and how an altered personality can eventually become the prime personality.

Together in the workshop, they talk about what it takes to help youth step out of the masks.

Bolton looked back at work he had done in the past with LINC, working with Northeast High School in the mid-2000s with the principal at the time, Vicki Murillo, and the LINC Caring Communities Coordinator at Northeast, Sean Akridge.

The school had been tagged by graffiti, and staff found a bullet hole in the front door. Murillo brought Bolton’s program to the school and she worked with Akridge — now LINC’s Director of Caring Communities — to bring at-risk youths together every week to build trust in a more caring, loving and positive group outside of the gangs that pervaded their community.

LINC and P.O.S.S.E. this year will be bringing the same work into LINC’s programs for boys and girls at Ruskin High School, Hickman Mills’ middle schools, Grandview Middle School and several elementary programs as well, Akridge said.

Bolton and Akridge have pictures where they reunited with some of those Northeast youths five to 10 years later, posing with the joy and confidence of thriving adulthoods.

“We want to give love and time,” Akridge said, “and give (youth) the validation they need . . . and a trusting and caring ear.”

It's about earning belief, Bolton said, about always asking questions — the right questions — that let youth feel safe to be honest and bridge understanding.

It’s about bringing them into a positive team, a winning team, a kind of extended family.

You help them see beyond today, Bolton said, and that there is more than yesterday.

“LINC has to make young people feel like they are part of something bigger,” he said.

You open the door that makes is possible to prepare youth to take action, to embrace leadership and build the social skills and life skills to thrive.

That’s how, Bolton said, a youth he worked with who had become known to his whole crowd and himself only by the name of “Killer D” became Darren again.

That’s how, together, we come to know and share the people that are most important in each other’s lives, and how we can honor and protect them.

We can erase those tombstones, as Bolton does, carefully, from each of the names on the board. And then he recircles each name with a heart.

By Joe Robertson/LINC Writer