Janene Shakir lays out the background and foundation for her work as the Coordinator of Community Programs for the Peace Education office and founder of the Pride Without Prejudice group.

“Believe it or not,” she says, “in 1995 Louisville had the highest rate of juvenile homicide in the country.”  Higher than New York, L.A, D.C. or New Orleans. And because they were mostly black-on-black incidents, you had families burying other family members. 

Janene illustrates the point by saying “Louisville is about this big,” as she snaps her fingers, “so you had cousins killing cousins every week. And something had to be done.” Janene was already working with young people through Youth for Peace (also part of the Peace Education Program) and seeing the success of teaching conflict resolution skills and understanding each other through cultural awareness. 

“We teach kids how to communicate non-violently and mediate between their peers and then we send them back into their communities. But,” she says, “I realized that I could teach kids all the skills in the world to negotiate their environment but if the adults in charge don’t work with them then there is that conflict as well. 

“Around the turn of the decade, we started the Community Institute to offer workshops to youth workers to teach adults the same things we teach the kids so they can speak the same language and work together.” 

The tangible results of this effort came when Janene organized a program for the Louisville Metro Youth Detention Center. “We went in and told them what we had been doing with the kids and that we were there to  conduct workshops for the adults as well and someone there said, “Well, you’ve just explained something to me.  Over the last several years while you’ve been doing this work with the kids, we have seen the intake here cut in half and the level of violent crime decrease.” That’s progress.

But Janene says the program also involves simple awareness agendas like taking a group of kids to a Chinese restaurant or watching movies about other cultures. “The main thing is to expose them to something different,” Janene says, “and achieve a certain level of understanding and compassion for each other.”