How does LIU Engage with Warring Gangs?

Noralez explained that working with inner-city youths involved in gang activity isn’t straightforward, it takes a lot of negotiation and compromise to make progress.

 

Dominique Noralez, Leadership Intervention Unit

“In any issue that you have with another individual there has to be some coming to the table or there will be no understanding of a path being charted forward to relieve yourselves of whatever personal issue we may have.  But also they can now be called generational trauma that these groups have faced.  These people walk by, live by, went to school up to whatever point they went to school with persons who might have hurt members of their family and they have done the same.  There has to be some compromise and some voluntary coming to the table.  It cannot be solved without coming to the table, it’s just the fact.  And it cannot be solved without the social protection system going to these persons because they will not, there’s a distrust of the system in some ways which is in many ways justifiable.  And so there has to be a going to individuals.  People look at it as us cuddling criminals, as they have called them, but these are persons who deserve opportunities as well, and they deserve to be seen, they deserve to be given an opportunity.  When that opportunity presents itself they have to have the tools to be able to take advantage of it.”