An initiative aimed at reducing gun violence, making connections within the community and promoting wellness in neighborhoods was in the spotlight Saturday during an event at the Bardwell Residences, 301 Weston Ave. in Aurora.
The four-hour event, called Lighting the Way to a Safer Aurora, was staged by Project Safe Aurora, according to the Kane County Health Department, which serves as the coalition’s lead agency. The event featured live music, free giveaways that included Chromebooks, gas cards and biometric gun safes, and presentations from guests who spoke about safety.
Elizabeth Nunez, violence prevention specialist for the Kane County Health Department, said the event is an important one.
“This is part of community health and things that affect the community and violence is one of them. Project Safe Aurora is focused on gun violence prevention,” she said. “In terms of what we see in regards to public health – gun violence has an effect not only on the individual but the whole community. Through this and our community coalition we just want to foster more community trust and awareness of the resources that are available to the community and also promoting safe storage of guns.”
The program started from a state grant through the Reimagine Public Safety Act, officials said.
“What they did was choose areas of high concentration of gun violence to kind of build a coalition that is based on community-driven data, voices and innovative strategies to kind of put together those strategies that are specific to each community to prevent violence,” Nunez said. “Throughout the years, we’ve grown to be over 27 different organizations ranging from law enforcement, domestic violence organizations, youth development – just a huge broad scope of organizations with different perspectives collaborating to talk about violence prevention.”
Nunez said she has spent time “going out to the different neighborhood groups” this year in order to talk with them and community leaders to raise awareness of Project Safe Aurora, which has also led “to putting together a community safety action plan.”
“It encompasses three different strategies and it’s all focused on what we’ve been seeing throughout the data – we take it from the Aurora police transparency hub and we can see based off that calls of service and incident reports,” she said. “We also, on a monthly basis, look at all the incident reports based on gun violence.
“We’ve come up with different strategies and have seen that a lot of the violence is coming from the East Side of Aurora involving the 14-24 age group,” Nunez said. “Our strategy was to partner with the East Aurora School District and implement a restorative practice program – a framework how schools and administrators engage with each other to build trust.”
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Aurora Ald. Jonathan Nunez, 4th Ward, was on hand to greet visitors Saturday and said the event was important, given that “there’s been months of work that’s been put into this.”
“A lot of time invested, especially with Elizabeth Nunez and the Kane County Health Department. It all started with a conversation we had last fall where she shared some data around shootings in Aurora and there was a large concentration just north of here,” he said. “With that and the monthly meetings she has with groups, they’ve been able to focus on what you have here and that’s lowering the rate of gun violence in Aurora, especially with our youth.”
Ilda Valdez of Aurora was among the first group attending speaker sessions inside the Bardwell building and said she wanted to attend “because I wanted to see what this project was about.”
“I don’t think it’s being talked about much and so I think bringing more community awareness to this is important so we have more people stepping up in the community,” she said. “You do have people that want to step up and support our police and fire and social services. I think to have a session so we understand what the issues are with gun control is excellent. I came to see what’s going on.”
David Sharos is a freelance reporter for The Beacon-News.