Story by Adrian Black
“When a young person tells me that they believe they’ll be dead or in jail by 18, they are giving us an opportunity,” says Eleuthera Lisch, Director of the Alive & Free program at Seattle, Washington’s Metrocenter YMCA. Through ambitious street outreach work, often performed by former gang members, Alive & Free teaches kids that “the disease of violence” they’ve been exposed to can, if left untreated, take their freedom—or worse—their life.
“Nah, bro. What would I need that for?” said David Lujano, an Alive & Free Outreach Worker, when a loosely acquainted kid tried to sell him a pistol in the detailing section of a friend’s local auto business. “You must not know me.”
Lujano gave the young man some perspective on the risks guns pose to kids and the community. “I’ve been in the system. I was just like you,” Lujano told him, grateful that the conversation came to him. “Some of the people I work with who have the most needs; we get them in the shop,” Lujano says. Those needs are most often for a capable guardian—someone to keep at-risk kids on a healthy path. “You work with them on a car, side by side. They tell you what’s going on. You learn together.”
In 2008, there were 17 gang-related deaths in Seattle’s King County, five of which were youth-on-youth shootings. The lost lives prompted the city to form the Seattle Youth Violence Prevention Initiative (SYVPI). The community-based coalition Lisch helped design and now supports with Alive & Free services focuses on 12 to 17-year-olds at high risk for involvement with violence. Alive & Free’s interactions on the street are only the beginning of a process that connects community outreach with classroom learning to put kids’ entire lifestyles up for review. “It’s an incredibly complex job,” says SYVPI director Mariko Lockhart, “but Eleuthera has a unique skill set that is extremely important with this line of work.”
“I was born with what I believe to be an exposure to and an infection by the disease of violence,” explains Lisch, whose turbulent and painful youth inspired her current vocation. Alive & Free teaches kids to recover from violence by resisting its triggers through “The New Rules for Living,” the most distilled form of a comprehensive curriculum called the “Alive & Free Prescription.”
The goal of the New Rules is to interrupt a widespread narrative that tells youth that violence is a solution to life’s struggles. “You have to tap into that every single time you feel disrespected, especially if you formerly responded by pulling a weapon on somebody or beating them,” says Lisch of the first rule. Alive & Free works against the labeling of gangs as violent and treating violence as a gang issue, addressing the stigma in a broader scope. Still, youth gang members in Seattle are more than three times as likely to be convicted of assault. “When we’re looking at violence through a public health framework, we’re trying to build resistance skills in young people,” Lisch says. This means meeting a kid where they’re at—not sitting in judgment of the lives they’ve led up to that moment.
“I had already been exposed to the street life. My mind was already made up,” says Brandon Shell. His mother sent him to Seattle from St. Louis, Missouri when he was just 11 years old as an attempt to put distance between him and his old neighborhood’s detrimental influences. “I’d see the hustlers and the pimps and I’d mimic that,” he says. Shell began selling drugs at age 13 and was carrying a gun by 15.
For Lujano, the choice was just as simple. His father drank and raised hell. “My mom used to tell me, ‘Go find your brothers down at the park.’” His brothers, however, were in a gang. “There comes this question of whether you’re in or out,” he says.
“Most of the people I ran with didn’t have people who cared about them,” Shell says. “So we said, ‘We’re gonna be family.’” Hearing the word “gang,” he rolls his eyes. “You’d need money for food and nobody’s gonna give you that, so people were selling drugs,” he says. In Seattle, the poverty rate is currently 11 percent for whites, 26 percent for Latinos like Lujano, and 35 percent for African-Americans like Shell. “They don’t feel like they have an alternative. If you wanna take that away, you gotta give them an alternative,” Shell says. Faced with such limited choices, Lisch understands why kids see drug dealing as the only option on the table. “If I’m only looking at the means of survival and it’s right now presented to me as an illegal economy, how far will I look elsewhere?” she explains.
“I didn’t pay attention in school. It was hard for me. It was easier for me to do something I understood,” says Shell, who landed in an alternative school at 17 after multiple expulsions from public high schools. Lisch recalls her first encounter with Shell, saying, “Brandon was the first young man I met when I walked into the classroom. He was extremely charismatic.” Shell, who had been applying that charisma to gang leadership, initially saw Lisch as an adversary. Every day she would throw him out of class, something he says he earned. “I’d come back and she would always let me back in. She saw the good in me before I did. If someone loves you that much, you have no choice—unless you’re a piece of shit—but to love them back.” Lisch was able to capitalize on Shell’s positive influence, which he hopes to use to help the program attract and retain many other at-risk youth.
“Kids get expelled for behavioral issues that stem from other things that are never actually addressed in school,” Lisch says. Through SYVPI’s programs, Alive & Free gets kids focused on their future and finding a risk-free career path. That change may betray “the life” for some, but as Lisch says, “If I’m not selling drugs anymore and I have a job and I feel pretty good about myself, and I see myself having a longer future than 18, did I sell out?”
Lisch opened Alive & Free in Seattle in 1999, but the genesis of the program was the work of Dr. Joseph Marshall, who founded it in 1987 as the Omega Boys Club’s Street Soldiers. In 1993, Lisch heard Dr. Marshall’s radio show of the same name out of San Francisco, California. “What came over the airwaves really moved me,” Lisch says. Marshall, a veteran anti-violence activist, was calling for peace in the streets. One year later, he would begin simulcasting to Los Angeles, California, where he lived for 11 years before coming to the Bay Area.
Amid the media-sensationalized, crack cocaine-fueled street battles of early 1990s Los Angeles, “Parents were very concerned that their kids were getting involved in gang violence,” says Marshall. “They would send their kids with relatives to live in other places. Unknowingly they spread the disease.” At the time, the lasting psychological impact on young people living through the trauma of toxic, unstable, violent communities wasn’t well understood.
When Lujano was almost 18, he moved from Los Angeles to Seattle. “I took myself out of L.A., but I never got L.A. out of my mind,” he says, “I came up here with the same mentality I had down there.” Barely a year later, at age 19, Lujano found himself amidst a drug deal gone sour. “Being in gangs, you’d party and get messed up and people would just start some shit,” he says. But this time, knives were drawn on both sides. Lujano woke up in the hospital to learn that he had killed a man.
He served 14 years in prison, where he says he had an epiphany about violence. “Being in the system, I had time to sit down and investigate things,” Lujano says. He bonded with inmates over finding the causes of the violence that put many of them there, triggers that still resurged at times. Helping defuse a potential brutal melee over a cigarette, Lujano’s stark conclusion was that people were just on auto-pilot, responding with violence out of habit. By the time of his release, Lujano had spent some five years committed to a message of non-violence, even negotiating truces between prison gang spokesmen. “They called me ‘The Peacemaker,’” he says. All of this prepared him for his work on the streets of Seattle.
Shouting into her cell phone over clamoring traffic on Southeast Seattle’s Rainier Avenue, Lisch helps a grieving relative plan for an annual candle-light vigil for a young woman who was killed in 2011, providing both emotional and material support. Promising to purchase flowers and candles, she knows the memorial will still stir an already aching community, but that this pain is a necessary part of healing.
Recalling a spring 2013 incident outside a bar in the Seattle suburb of Auburn, Lisch thinks back to the first moment of this major community loss.
“They were not young people we knew, but we had responsibility to support the youth and community impacted by this tragedy” she says, of the triple homicide in March. Dawn was coming. Families were arriving. Lisch and her team were called to support the community and quickly moved past the police cordon set up around the victims. Her first thought was to identify their mothers, aunts, and grandmothers, a task made easy by the women’s disconsolate wailing. “Part of it is really just being a shoulder to cry on,” she says. “When a crisis happens in a community, everybody’s got a role. ”
Her team quickly checked in with young people that had congregated in search of answers about how best to support their healing and recovery from the horrific incident. “There can be points of escalation in grief,” Lisch says. “Gossip was starting about it on Facebook about who might have done it.” The incident, like all gun violence, had serious potential for retaliation, which they were working to alleviate.
For Lisch, Lujano, and others, this “critical incident response management” is a 24/7 responsibility. “It’s her life’s work,” says Lockhart. “She will often show up at a morning meeting having been up until 4 am.” To that, Lisch says, matter-of-factly, “Why waste the clock?”
“All sorts of folks are having a conversation about how it’s time to treat gun violence like a public health issue,” Lisch says, having recently returned from Washington, D.C., where she met with presidential and vice presidential staff to discuss gun control legislation.
The Centers for Disease Control, which monitors youth violence, just recently lifted a ban on gun violence research that was orchestrated 17 years ago by the National Rifle Association. “Our gun lobbyists aren’t interested or concerned about our young people,” Lisch says. “It’s the same reason why big tobacco couldn’t be confronted.”
America isn’t just the gun country, it’s the jail country too. The United States imprisons citizens at a rate higher than China, India, and Brazil combined. Lisch has been in talks with the Department of Justice and its Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, addressing issues like disproportionate minority contact with the juvenile and adult justice systems.
Seattle particularly suffers from this problem. The US Department of Education investigated the city in March over African-Americans being suspended or expelled more than three times as often as other students. Seattle’s black youth are one and a half times more likely than all others to enter the juvenile justice system and, once there, are six times as likely to be transferred to adult court. Although African-Americans and Latinos make up 13 and 17 percent of the US population respectively, they account for 37 and 35 percent of Americans behind bars.
President Obama, in a July speech following the State of Florida v. George Zimmerman verdict, highlighted that “there is a history of racial disparities in the application of our criminal laws,” referring to the decades-long “War on Drugs”. For example, crack cocaine is punished at a rate of 18:1 compared to powder, and despite the variants being pharmacologically identical and evenly used among races, 83 percent of federal crack cocaine defendants are black. In the state of Washington, African-Americans are almost three times as likely to be arrested for marijuana possession, although rates of use between ethnic groups are nearly equal. “All of this is legal,” says Dr. Marshall. “That needs to change.”
Attorney General Eric Holder announced in August a series of steps intended to scale back the War on Drugs, and by extension, on gangs, in order to alleviate further undermining of social stability. “We will start by fundamentally rethinking the notion of mandatory minimum sentences for drug-related crimes,” Holder said, adding “We cannot simply prosecute or incarcerate our way to becoming a safer nation.”
“Any attempt to have a war on gangs is a war on human life,” Lisch says, “It’s made it impossible to rely on generations of fathers who are now [imprisoned].” SYVPI offers a support group for fatherlessness, recognizing it as a serious risk factor for youth involvement in gangs and gang violence.
“We couldn’t find this kid at all,” Lujano says. “His mom was worried about him. He didn’t show up to court, so they got a warrant for his arrest.” 16-year-old “D” was caught up in drugs, having been recently introduced to crystal meth. Lujano performed court advocacy for him, carrying out the Alive & Free model of valuing treatment over incarceration. “Little by little, he started opening up,” says Lujano, who has been able to present “D” with some better options.
“There’s a ton of little dudes out there selling drugs and shooting guns,” says Shell. “What’s left when they have no leadership is that they’re out here just going crazy.” In a power vacuum ripe for a better kind of mentorship, Shell is ready to give back. “This is my hood. Anything that comes over that West Seattle Bridge, I’ve got a say so in what goes on,” he says, with the authority of a man who has hard-earned life lessons to share. “You’re gonna go get in this fight? Nah. Come kick it with me,” he says.
“Back then, we had respect, we had money, we had it all,” says Shell, the only one of the five core members of his old crew currently alive and free. He refused to have his little brother share his crew’s fate. “I never gave him any other choice,” says Shell. “He’s never been in trouble, never went to jail, nothing. I said, ‘Not you. We’re gonna break the cycle.’”
Alive & Free is working to do just that, giving Seattle’s at-risk youth the tools to succeed. “The four New Rules for Living can take a lifetime to understand and embrace,” says Lisch of “graduating” from Alive & Free. You don’t just pass a test and move on to easy street. “When I’m out there grocery shopping, I’m encountering folks who are part of our community that are a part of this issue. If we do it right, we’re building people back into their rightful place in society. We graduate in terms of purpose in a community over time.”

Gallery • 3 Photos

David Lujano struggled through gang related activity in his youth, eventually finding himself behind bars. Now Lujano has put his life on track and found success as an outreach worker for Alive & Free.