Friday, May 18, 2012

At birth, Jason’s first home from the hospital was a squat in the Woodberry Down estate, north London, moving shortly thereafter to a flat in Tottenham. Having grown up in Tottenham, he experienced many of the issues facing the youth of today in inner-city London.
Sadly, these experiences included the loss of a number of friends and a cousin to gun and knife violence.
Jason can relate to those entrenched in street life and has seen firsthand how destructive the lifestyle is.

I first exchanged ideas back and forth with Jason in 2010 via the website.
We discussed the issues with responses to gangs at the time noting the lack of community involvement in some areas, and we agreed that ideally material, preventions and interventions dealing with gang members should be peer led. Ex
bangers, to borrow an American term and those with experience of violent offending, should be delivering.
There’s no point in getting someone without these experiences to deliver anything to this target market. All that young person will be thinking is,

“you don’t know where I am coming from, you have not experienced what I live on a daily and if I was from where you are from I probably wouldn’t be
doing this in the first place”
Throughout 2010-2012 Jason visited CeaseFire Chicago, a pioneering gang violence prevention project and secured International Replication Partnership status with CeaseFire.
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