WTTW documentaries highlight ‘people creating conditions for peace'

Yahoo

17-02-2025

On the first day WTTW videographers filmed Damien Morris at work in Garfield Park, they responded to the scene of a shooting, a hospital where one of Morris' colleagues had a son being treated for a gunshot wound and an event for Morris' organization, Breakthrough Chicago.
'(Director) Teresa (White) was like, 'Wow, that was an eventful first five hours,'' Morris said. 'And I was like, 'Well, welcome to my life.''
Morris is one of five subjects in WTTW's latest 'Firsthand' documentary series, an annual set of films and programming focused on different social issues. This year's five short films follow a range of interventions, from street outreach to a restorative justice court in North Lawndale to conflict mediation, all geared toward reducing interpersonal violence in Chicago.
Executive producer Dan Protess said he'd wanted to showcase community violence interventions since he'd worked on a previous series about gun violence years ago.
'I wanted to show stories of people who were creating conditions for peace,' he said.
Protess added that one of his goals with the series was to make a case that these interventions are 'a vital city service, the same way policing and firefighting and ambulances emergency responders are considered to be essential city services.'
Protess also said he wanted to highlight how 'fragile' support can be for the organizations covered in the series. Morris' organization, the Garfield Park-based Breakthrough, has recently been in the news alongside other nonprofits who were concerned about what a potential federal funding freeze might mean for them. Violence intervention groups typically receive money from state, local and private philanthropic sources.
Illinois' Reimagine Public Safety Act, which became law in 2021, sets aside roughly $240 million for violence prevention programs throughout the state. Civic leaders announced $100 million in funding for anti-violence work last year, and Gov. JB Pritzker has called for more consistent funding to these programs after years of instability.
In the 2010s, CeaseFire Illinois, which later became part of CureViolence, was often forced to lay off its workers due to funding issues. A push to address spikes in firearm violence in 2016 and 2020 brought a new wave of public interest in peacekeeping in particular, which relies on the connections of former or still-involved gang members to snuff out conflicts and curb violence.
Kathryn Bocanegra, a University of Illinois Chicago scholar of social work who will give a lecture in connection with the series, said the average Chicagoan 'probably has no clue what (peacekeeping) is.'
But the documentary series, she said, would contribute to a broader public discussion of how to incorporate violence intervention into public safety.
A significant amount of the work highlighted in the series hinges on person-to-person relationships. Morris is shown engaged in many of the relationships that power his work throughout his segment but also draws a line about the presence of a camera crew when he's shown pulling up to Mount Sinai Hospital to speak to a peacekeeper whose son had just been shot.
'Because this is a sensitive matter, I won't be able to film this part,' he says, sitting in a van outside the hospital.
Morris later described that point in the film as 'a very vulnerable, intense moment' where the production had to defer to the situation.
Cedric Hawkins, another subject of the series, who works with the nonprofit Chicago CRED, said it was challenging to have cameras present at critical response moments, like speaking to a group of boys and young men in North Lawndale whose friend had just been killed.
He'd only gotten to know that group in the last year, he said, and had originally only planned to visit the shooting site with the camera crew. But they ran into some of the group out on the block and they became a part of the final documentary.
'I didn't even want to bother them,' he said. '(But) once you catch these youngsters, and you show them something different that can help them, then you're just a big homie in a different way.'
The series premieres Monday.