This weekend is Wear Orange Day, when municipalities and communities across the country hold events, and wear orange, to raise awareness around gun violence and demand gun safety policy. As part of an ongoing partnership with Everytown for Gun Safety, the lead organization behind Wear Orange Day, LISC is supporting volunteer groups and residents to make this year's events the most impactful yet.
The waking nightmare of recent mass slaughters in Buffalo, NY, and Uvalde, TX, overlies a reality that plays out every day in communities across the country. So out of control is our epidemic of gun violence that in recent years, for America’s children—for our children—gunshot wounds have become the leading cause of death.
In every corner of America, people are looking for effective ways to say it has to stop, to honor the lives cut short and show love for survivors aching with loss, to stand up and be counted in the movement for common-sense gun safety.
For hundreds of thousands of people around the country, Wear Orange Weekend (June 3-5) is one way to do that. Wear Orange is an initiative of Everytown for Gun Safety, the country’s largest gun-safety advocacy organization, along with its network of survivors and volunteers organized under Moms Demand Action and Students Demand Action. It began with the firearm death of a 15-year-old girl, Hadiya Pendleton, in a Southside Chicago park in 2013. Her friends made a statement by wrapping themselves in orange—the color people wear in woods and fields during hunting season to say heads up, human presence here, don’t shoot.
Building on a partnership with Everytown that began in 2021, with safety trainings in Philadelphia, Jacksonville, FL, and Washington, DC, this year LISC’s Safety & Justice team was tapped to support Wear Orange by providing technical assistance to ten groups around the country that are mounting place-based projects as part of the nationwide event. Working with a $10,000 grant from Everytown's Community Safety Fund, each of these largely volunteer groups is applying the principles of place-based crime prevention to shape their local environment for safety and build a sense of “yes we can” in the process.
In San Francisco’s Mission District, organizers are creating a mural—“We Can End Gun Violence”—at the headquarters of the anti-violence outfit United Playaz. The mural-making will ultimately bring together local volunteers and artists to lift up the life of Camilo Senchnya-Beltran. “I was so amazed by him and felt so very lucky to call him my son,” writes his mother, Clare Senchnya. Eight years ago now, this “beautiful, kind” emergency medical technician was shot dead at the age of 26 by a stranger’s bullet.
In Baltimore’s Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood, the epicenter of the turmoil that followed Freddie Gray’s 2015 death in police custody, the Family Survivor Network is leading a work day to open up a safe green space for all to enjoy. In Norfolk, VA, Teens With A Purpose are hosting a festival where the group hopes to join up with new partners to strengthen the anti-violence work to come.
LISC’s technical assistance to these and other groups, organized in a webinar, written guidance, and “office hours” for consultation, has focused on educating participants about situational crime prevention. This is often portrayed as a “crime triangle” which shows that, for any crime to take place, three factors must converge: a potential victim, an offender and a suitable place. The crime triangle recognizes the critical role that place plays in that dynamic. Activating spaces for positive, people-friendly uses, creating open sightlines that put community eyes on a space, and establishing natural barriers (landscaping, for example) that gently suggest a place is enclosed for community use—all these can have an impact on safety.
Just coming together in Wear Orange events can build the sense of collective efficacy that’s crucial for any shared undertaking. LISC’s technical assistance has included a primer for putting on successful community events, with brass-tacks to-dos like spreading the word through social media and ordering a port-a-potty.
LISC is one among a broad spectrum of Wear Orange supporters—including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the nation’s major teachers’ organizations, The National Coalition Against Domestic Violence and Planned Parenthood, LGBTQ organizations like The Trevor Project and Human Rights Campaign, a host of gun-safety groups such as Sandy Hook Promise and the Brady Campaign. Landmark infrastructure, from the Empire State Building to LA’s City Hall, from Main Street Square in Rapid City, SD, to a pedestrian overpass in Knoxville, TN, will be lit up in orange solidarity over the weekend.
“One of the things I appreciate about Wear Orange is the diversity of participants and projects,” says LISC Safety & Justice senior program officer LeVar Michael. “That really sends home the message that gun violence impacts everyone, no matter where you live. It happens in a number of ways, whether it’s mass shootings or the day-to-day gun violence that we see in jurisdictions across the country every night. Wear Orange is about raising awareness: we can work collaboratively to change this, but it takes folks getting involved.”
Get involved. #WearOrange.
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LISC Jacksonville executive director Irvin Cohen weighs in on "Wear Orange Day" and the links between racial equity, community development and putting an end to gun violence in an op-ed for the Florida Times-Union.