Five Core Components

CeaseFire is a mix of five core components: community mobilization, youth outreach, public education, faith-based leader involvement, and criminal justice participation.

Community Mobilization

Community mobilization focuses on residents, local businesses, service organizations, and members of the faith community to build a safer and more viable community.

The purpose of community mobilization is to build and energize a base of support for CeaseFire that involves a variety of efforts to both stop shootings and killings in the near term and to change the underlying conditions that give rise to shootings and killings in the long term.

Violence prevention coordinators take the lead on community mobilization by building neighborhood-based coalitions of local law enforcement, youth organizations, faith leaders, block clubs, and residents. They ensure responses to all shootings, keep up on all relevant data, and distribute public education materials.

Central to the work of the violence prevention coordinators is the development of a violence prevention plan that describes the nature and extent of violence in the partner community, current efforts to respond to the violence (including existing community resources) and identifies goals, objectives, and activities that are directed at stopping the shootings and killings.

Youth Outreach

Outreach workers are street-smart individuals who identify and engage individuals who are at high risk of becoming involved in violence in order to prevent shootings and killings from occurring.

Outreach workers are challenged to build sufficient trust with these high risk individuals, many of whom are gang-involved, to be able to influence the ways these young people think and act – and to redirect them to positive pursuits, including jobs, job training, and returning to school.

Outreach workers meet and work with those they assist in non-traditional settings – parks, street corners, places young people gather – during non-traditional hours when local data indicate violence is most likely to occur, particularly evenings and late-night hours and on weekends.

Public Education

CeaseFire employs a broad-based public education campaign to facilitate behavior change and promote nonviolence. Neighborhoods are saturated with posters, leaflets, flyers, yard signs, bumper stickers, T-shirts, buttons and other materials that disparage violence and carry pointed messages about the consequences of shootings and killings. (Click here to view samples.)

Faith-Based Leader Involvement

Faith-based leaders are in a unique position to influence the thinking and behavior of community members and those who are at risk of involvement in shootings and killings. Many people turn to their church, mosque, or synagogue for comfort and strength, seeking a higher power to guide them to a path that will lead them away from a destructive lifestyle to one that is positive and constructive.

CeaseFire works to engage members of the faith community to perform activities that complement those of the outreach workers. These faith leaders open safe havens, talk to high-risk individuals, participate and provide leadership in shooting responses, preach nonviolence, and urge congregants to work to stop shootings and killings. (Click here to learn more.)

Criminal Justice Participation

Individuals responsible for shootings and killings need to be held accountable to the community for their actions. This is not an end that can be definitely achieved without the involvement of police, the courts and corrections agencies – until the thinking completely changes.

CeaseFire builds on the partnerships that many communities already have with police and fosters relationships with community residents in neighborhoods where those relationships may have been strained in the past. CeaseFire, residents, and police should all share the common goal of saving lives and making neighborhoods safe.

Police notify the Chicago Project and CeaseFire community partners of shootings and killings in CeaseFire communities so they can mobilize community responses and intervene to prevent escalations. Police frequently participate in the community responses to shootings and other CeaseFire events.