With its high rates of drug cartel deaths and femicide, Ciudad Juárez has often been described as one of the most violent cities in the world – if not the single most dangerous city.

“When you speak about Juárez, you have to speak about violence,” said Luis Mendoza, who has been living in the city across the border from El Paso his whole life.

“We have to think about where the roots of the violence are and where we can prevent violent behaviors and situations from happening in the future,” added Mendoza, who serves as the chief operating officer for the Juárez . “So you really have to work with youth and children.”

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for ����Ӱ�� Newsletter

Now, the foundation’s Escuelas de Bienestar, or wellness schools, are using sports and play to deter young children from entering a life of violence while helping them develop self-awareness and skills to interact and communicate with others, and teaching them how to manage emotions and build relationships through physical activities.

“We know that sports and play is a very powerful tool for organizations, individuals, teachers, schools, and other foundations to affect social change,” Mendoza said. “The problem is we have kids at school that are expressing or replicating cycles of violence or unhealthy behaviors. We have teachers that don’t have a curriculum or they don’t have tools to connect with the kids. That’s when we come into play.”

From 2008 to 2012, the city of 1.3 million was widely deemed the most dangerous place on earth. Murders shot above . In 2022, Juárez reported 1,045 homicides, a 26% compared to the previous year.

A by the World Health Organization found that youth violence is a global public health problem that ranges from bullying and fighting and can escalate to severe sexual and physical assault and homicide.

“Worldwide, an estimated 200,000 homicides occur among youth 10 to 29 years old each year, making it the fourth leading cause of death for people in this age group,” the study showed, noting that youth homicide and non-fatal violence often has a lifelong impact on a person’s wellbeing.

The foundation – a sister organization to the Paso del Norte Community Foundation and the Paso del Norte Health Foundation in El Paso that work together to improve the quality of life in the region – searched through available programs and partnered with to find a way to help the youth of Juárez.

A United Kingdom-based nonprofit, Coaches Across Continents teaches active citizens and strengthens organizations to create sustainable social impact in their communities.

“They reach underserved communities, and it’s not about learning something that’s in the school curriculum,” Mendoza said. “It’s about learning topics that are important for their health, human development, communications, and tough topics that sometimes they don’t have the tools to manage.”

Coaches Across Continents is partnering with FPDN to train physical education teachers in Juárez so that they’re able to meet the needs of their students while addressing challenging topics such as human rights, drug use, drug prevention, sexual health, violence and emotional health and well-being.

“It’s a train-the-trainer model to teach teachers on how to use play to develop those life skills and to address social topics that are hard to talk about in other educational settings,” Mendoza said. The teachers are going to talk about nutrition, mental health, human rights, women’s rights, and other topics, in addition to sports.

Physical education teachers are oftentimes seen as less sophisticated than other educators. However, Mendoza said these educators need to be acknowledged for their impact on their students.

“The power that PE teachers and coaches have on the development of children and youths is enormous,” he said. “We have learned that they want more training to diversify their classes, so they’re not only focused on gym class but on sports and play. They want to be able to use their tools to strengthen abilities and skills.”

Since the inception of Escuelas de Bienestar in 2017, 303 participants have joined the program impacting 77,018 school children in Juárez. About 60% of those enrolled in the program work as PE teachers, while the remainder is church youth groups, community centers and other groups that work with children regularly.

The trainers sign-up for a three-year commitment and receive training on developing games to use with their students while receiving support from the foundation.

“After those three years, the data shows us that (the trainers) already know how to make up games by themselves without the accompaniment of the ��ܲԻ岹��í�Dz� or coaches and they are able to improvise,” Mendoza said.

As part of the three-year commitment, participants must attend at least one yearly training where Fundación Paso Del Norte facilitates members of Coaches Across Continents who fly across the globe to offer training in Juárez.

“They would work with my program officer and my coach locally, and both of them would deliver the training for teachers,” Mendoza said. “In this four-day training, these two coaches are in charge of facilitating the whole methodology.”

Besides the in-person training, participants have access to an international information hub where members from all over the world upload new games, materials, tools and resources for all to use and incorporate into their classes.

Mendoza said connecting with Coaches Across Continents was an easy process resulting in a fruitful relationship.

“Usually, they want to work with communities that have a challenge in human rights and social development with some sort of a problem that the sports and games could be useful to use as a tool,” he said. “It was not difficult.”

The lack of resources for teachers is a worldwide phenomenon affecting instructors in lower-income places . Escuelas de Bienestar is conscious of this when offering training to ensure the programs succeed with their available supplies.

“We would have loved to give every school that we work with a full kit of PE class material,” Mendoza said. “We couldn’t do it with every school, but we did invest resources to fully equip 20 schools in Juárez. And every teacher participating in our program gets a donation of soccer balls that (don’t go flat).”

The organization received 5,000 soccer balls from, 4,200 of which have been distributed throughout the program.

“[Sting, the singer] started this organization with the objective of getting soccer balls to the poorest communities and underserved communities around the world because he believed that playing could change the world,” Mendoza said.

The , the project’s flagship product, is an ultra-durable ball that doesn’t need a pump and never goes flat, even when punctured. Its design allows withstanding the most demanding playing conditions.

“The organization understands that the context of the kids is so different,” Mendoza said. “We have kids that play in the streets.”

In 2023, FPDN is reviewing the previous years of the program and learning how to continue helping the children of Juárez. It plans to survey program participants and other instructors outside of its network to evaluate its impact and identify resources and tools they have. From there, it will make adjustments.

“This year, we are very excited to explore how the program could be sustained in the community in one way or another,” Mendoza said, adding that the foundation plans to host one workshop in 2023 as opposed to the three it held in previous years.

Based on the findings for this year, the program will be updated and modified to provide support year-round available for every teacher in the country to access it and learn from the years the program operated.

“We don’t want to mention it as an exit strategy or as it is phasing out,” said Mendoza. “We prefer to communicate that this year we’re exploring how the program can become self-sufficient at some point with the help of teachers and community.”

This story was co-published with as part of our joint .

This first appeared on and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Careful study is required to tease out the causes, but it seems clear that during this period of global upheaval, children have been marinating in the same that affects their families and communities after being cut off from many of the social connections and services that help steady them in normal times. Such trauma, including violent victimization, is a for adolescents committing violent offenses and becoming involved with the criminal justice system. 

This week is , which aims to raise awareness about the roots of youth violence and ways of stopping it before it starts. At LISC, a national community development nonprofit, I lead a team that works closely with residents and local organizations, including schools, to tackle the root causes of crime and promote safety. Our experience suggests it would be a tragic mistake to double down on zero-tolerance school discipline policies that rely heavily on suspension, expulsion and referrals to law enforcement. 

Accountability is important, but without supportive interventions, the consequences tend to be punitive and push kids out of learning environments and into the criminal justice system — what is often termed the school-to-prison pipeline. One study showed that students in were more likely to drop out, less likely to go to college and more likely to end up being arrested and incarcerated than those in schools with less tendency to use suspension and expulsion. These policies typically have the harshest impact on children in and , especially Black boys — kids from the very communities that have suffered most in the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of sickness, death, unemployment and small-business closures.

Instead, schools — the frontline organizations for child development — can be the starting place for forging relationships with community partners to meet the needs of individual children and help them navigate challenging environments without descending into a cycle of violence that’s likely to upend their young lives.

The most promising school-based interventions do two things. One, they enlist mentors or counselors who are relatable to the kids they serve, who look like them and have experience that allows them to speak credibly to specific children’s struggles and hopes. Two, they reach out into their communities in an all-hands-on-deck approach to a problem that educators cannot address alone.

The Spokane, Washington, school district, for example, hired a director of community relations and diversity training who has 17 years’ experience in the local juvenile court system and a deep understanding of how children of color in this majority-white city tend to experience disproportionately higher rates of school exclusions and arrests than their white peers. With help from a , and her colleagues created the RISE program, which connects individual students with community-based services they may need and has paired more than 130 kids with a relatable mentor who supports their journey in a close-up way. One mentor, , actually puzzles out solutions alongside his mentees in their algebra class, encouraging friendly competition over who can score highest on tests. “They just need a connection to someone,” he says.

Kids in RISE are building more positive relationships with administration and staff, sharply reducing the need for exclusionary punishments. Mentors have averted fights in real time — like one brewing recently in a school cafeteria, where a girl on the receiving end of some nasty insults was ready to fight her tormentor. Her friend ran for a RISE mentor, who rushed in to defuse the situation. Another Spokane teen, who had never achieved more than a 2.0 average, scored a 4.0 last semester and is accumulating credits toward graduation.

Several years ago, school administrators in Lompoc, California, became concerned about an increase in gang violence. They created the , which includes the school district and various local service, health and faith-based organizations. The coalition holds regular community dialogues that, among other things, helped to identify specific street locations where safety is a concern. This information, coupled with training from the , is informing a Safe Passage initiative in which trusted adult “peacebuilders” will work to defuse conflicts and keep an eye out along kids’ routes to and from Lompoc schools. The group also inaugurated a class for the parents of sixth graders who, under the influence of local gangs, had been getting into trouble. The class, in the format of a peace circle that flattens power hierarchies and encourages sharing, promotes open collaboration between parents and schools to address individual problems and help children succeed. 

In Florida’s Broward County Public Schools, the country’s sixth-largest district, there was an uptick in problematic student social-media posts — not just bullying, but outright threats. So the district is deploying its curriculum on internet safety, , both in schools and in other community settings around the district. 

All these interventions lie outside the traditional mission of teaching and depend on schools’ ability to engage community partners and sometimes hire “credible messengers” to intervene before fear, frustration and groupthink lead to violent outbursts and victimization. There’s strong evidence from longstanding programs like the Massachusetts and (formerly CeaseFire) that this grassroots-led, collaborative, non-punitive approach can reduce youth arrests for violent offenses and neighborhood gun violence. 

Schools are a natural home for such interventions, but districts need dedicated resources and an engaged community to carry them out. With these programs, educators can send an important message to all kids, including those who may be at risk of hurting others and being hurt in turn: You belong right here with us, learning and growing, in peace and safety.

Mona Mangat is vice president for safety & justice at , a national community development nonprofit

All West wanted was to talk to Miayan. This was in early 2019, not long after Roca, a violence prevention program, launched in Baltimore.

“I was running the streets,” Miayan said. “Running the streets, getting into everything I could.”

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for ����Ӱ�� Newsletter

Miayan was working corners, selling drugs, often making more than $700 each week. His crew earned enough from drug sales that they became the target of law enforcement. And just like he did when he saw West’s minivan, when the cops came, Miayan ran. Most times Miayan won that foot race. (The Trace and The Guardian are not using his full name, or that of other young people, since many of their offenses occurred when they were minors.)

What Miayan had in speed, West surpassed in persistence. West, Roca’s youth work supervisor, kept coming back, sometimes with his partner, Teshombae Harvell. They hoped to begin the therapy needed to unpack the experiences that weighed on Miayan. He grew up watching family members struggle with drug addiction and get drawn into the drug trade only to be snatched away by the criminal justice system. For his 20 years, Miayan had seen arguments turn violent, violence turn deadly, and friends’ lives cut short. Not much to hope for.

West, Harvell, and Roca needed time with Miayan to make sure he didn’t end up like so many teenage boys and young men in his neighborhood. But each day Miayan was drawn deeper into danger.

West knew the teenager’s past: Miayan had been raised mostly by his grandmother; he lived in Sandtown-Winchester, a place where more than half the children face poverty, and where police tackled and arrested Freddie Gray before he died in their custody. Miayan grew up an athlete, excelling in football and basketball. When getting Miayan to practice became untenable, those quick feet got put to work elsewhere.

Roca’s clients, Miayan included, are often caught between the underground and legal economies. It can take time to convince them to leave illegal money-making behind. And bad things happen during that window.

In the last 15 years, 16- to 25-year-olds accounted for the largest share of Baltimore’s fatal shooting victims. Roca is part a public health response to violence within this age group, an approach that isn’t new nationally or in Baltimore. The program targets 16- to 24 year olds, mostly males like Miayan, who have had at least brushes with the criminal justice system, and are likely to be either a perpetrator or a victim of gun violence.

Roca approaches violence interruption as a long game. Through cognitive behavioral therapy, the program tries to help people manage their trauma and regulate their responses to stress and conflict. It’s not a prevention program, as the staff points out, but an intervention program that can take up to four years to yield results. “If we can… teach them how to manage conflict by the age of 20, we’re setting the city up for success one young person at a time,” said James Timpson, who runs Roca-Baltimore’s community collaborations.

For Roca, time cuts both ways. There is the amount of time it takes to transform a young person, and there is an urgency to be in contact with them at all times, the fear of missing even one phone call. It’s why West took calls from Roca participants during a recent vacation to Jamaica. “It can put a strain on your personal life, but we have to be there,” West said.

But like any response to Baltimore’s violence crisis, Roca faces daunting challenges. There are the perverse economic incentives the clients contend with: Earning $1,000 a week in the underground economy can be more appealing than a job making $15 an hour. Community-based violence prevention programs aren’t designed to upend harsh economic realities, but over time, staffers try to appeal to clients’ values as an incentive to change, a philosophy that animates President Joe Biden’s big bet on community-based violence prevention. If people value their freedom, and their family, then carrying a gun might rob them of both.

A conversation months in the making

By their late teens, many of the boys and young men across Baltimore are carrying trauma. The heft doesn’t slow their run from authorities, or Roca workers, but it clouds their decision making. For Miayan, life centered around the day, the moment. He woke up thinking about survival. “I got to go outside and make some money, so I’ll eat today and stuff like that,” he remembered thinking.

He also needed to support a painkiller habit he developed in his teens. On the days, and there were a few, when West and Harvell tracked Miayan down, he didn’t want to hear what they had to say about decision making, or leaving the block behind. He wasn’t ready.

On Mother’s Day 2019, it looked like the time Miayan needed was about to run out. For all his skill, his run in the early morning of May 5, 2019 was his last escape from the cops. One misplaced step cost him his balance. Gravity did the rest. Miayan’s head hit the ground with enough force to put him in a coma, leaving him temporarily paralyzed. His grandmother sat by his bedside every day, holding his hand and praying. “I didn’t know what the outcome was going to be,” Deborah Moore said.

West joined her sentry at his bed. For two months, he checked in on Miayan at the hospital. It was just Miayan, his grandmother and West — not his crew. Only then, fresh out of a coma and temporarily paralyzed, did Miayan decide to give Roca a real chance, beginning the conversation that West wanted to start in early 2019. He began working through the trauma with West in that hospital room and at the physical therapy sessions where Miayan learned how to walk again.

The same year Miayan fell, the year he turned 18, was the deadliest in Baltimore’s history. By the end of 2019, 348 people were killed. The killings fell heavily on young people. More than one third of homicide victims were between the ages of 16 and 25 in that year.

The long game of violence reduction

Roca means “rock” in Spanish. The organization was born in Massachusetts in the late 1980s, as a way to treat the challenges endured by young people struggling with poverty, violence, and limited job opportunities.

“These young people that are in these environments, have been placed in situations out of their control at a very young age, but they do have the ability to learn the skills to not react,” said Kurt Palmero, director of Roca-Baltimore. “But they’re not just going to flip a switch and have it happen (immediately).”

Roca dispatches youth interventionists like West and Harvell in much the way Safe Streets, a prominent violence prevention organization, sends credible messengers to defuse conflicts. But rather than just addressing the flashpoint, Roca youth workers spend time with each one of the young men and women referred to the program to teach them how to process their feelings in a way that doesn’t turn violent or keeps them away from places where they are exposed to violence.

It’s usually police, the carceral system, or social services agencies that refer youth to the program. Poor behavior, or as was the case with Miayan, reluctance to participate, doesn’t disqualify them. And while that may not seem like an efficient way to address root causes of violence, Roca’s staff believes its long-term approach is the best way to reduce conflicts in a city where slights can turn deadly.

Molly Baldwin, who founded Roca in Massachusetts, brought the program to Baltimore in 2018. The city was about to record 300-plus homicides for the fourth consecutive year. Patience was wearing thin in City Hall, as Baltimore had churned through its third police commissioner in as many years, with two of them losing their jobs for not tamping down violence. Timpson, a Baltimore native, and a large figure in violence interruption, came to Roca from Safe Streets, giving the program credibility. After a political fight over funding, the city pitched in $2.5 million over four years, a fraction of Roca’s cost; Roca is mostly funded by philanthropic groups like the Abell Foundation in Baltimore and the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

Roca-Baltimore hasn’t had a full class of participants finish the four years, so they’re unable to measure outcomes in hard numbers. But there are signs of success. Of those who have been through the Massachusetts program, 84 percent were not arrested afterward.

There is some hope that programs like Roca could amplify their impact with a boost from Biden’s $5 billion pledge to assist community based gun violence prevention groups. But money, spread across the country over eight years, will be up against the time it takes to transform the lives of the young men on the front lines.In the time it takes Roca to make progress with its clients, they can be arrested or in some cases killed.

Roca’s supporters have a favored analogy for the program’s length and persistence. “All of us at that age are not wired to think long term. You need a support network that can put you in an environment that can get you through that time until you get to a point where the lightbulb comes on,” said Marc Schindler, executive director of Justice Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank that works on criminal justice solutions. “We have another place where we send kids that age to grow up and we let them make mistake after mistake until they do. It’s called college.”

Fight or flight

Roca helps people figure out their long-term plans. But helping young men and women move past crises can be a Sisyphean task. On one morning in May, West and Harvell headed to Southwest Baltimore to pick up Tyron, who has been with the program since its start. The subject that day: How his housemates disrespect him.

He was arrested for armed robbery at 16, and eventually referred to Roca by Baltimore’s Department of Human Services. Now 20, Tyron is looking for a way out of Baltimore. “A plant can’t grow if it stays in the same pot,” Tyron said. One liners like that provide a glimpse into Tyron’s intelligence. Like a lawyer, he sparred with Harvell in the back of the minivan as West drove Tyron to the grocery store.

Tyron grew up in foster care. His biological parents have been in and out of his life, contributing to a sense of abandonment. The feeling that he isn’t receiving sufficient respect drove his entire conversation with Harvell. In the case of his roommates, it’s who is cleaning, who can have guests, and remembering to close the bathroom door.

The conflict might seem small. But it’s not for Tyron and so many others. When tension builds all people choose to fight, flee, or freeze. “More often than not, our guys choose to fight because that’s where they feel comfortable,” Palermo said.

Harvell reached to the center console of the minivan for a deck of laminated cards that list the different components of cognitive behavioral therapy. He flipped to the card that read: “think, do, feel.” Harvell suggested that his method of communication might not work with his housemates. Tyron didn’t want to hear it. Harvell paused, and allowed Tyron to blow off more steam. “You can’t expect people to sympathize with your life affairs,” Harvell told Tyron.“Cause everybody has their own issues.”

Then Tyron stopped, and told Harvell he appreciated the way he explained the issue. Harvell’s move was subtle. “I gave him CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) without him knowing he was getting CBT,” Harvell later said.

West, who’d made the initial contact with Tyron, reflected on his path. “He was much harder to work with when we started,” West said. It’s taken years of sessions like this to get Tyron to embrace Harvell’s approach. Four years ago, Tyron was barely literate, according to West. Now he has become a voracious reader, and a bit of a know-it-all.

Leaving Baltimore behind

Harvell and West left the Food Depot and took Tyron to lunch at a Peruvian restaurant on Eastern Avenue, the heart of the city’s Latinx community. Tyron smiled more, and asked the cooks about a dish he had never seen before. It was tripe, beef stomach. “I’ll try that,” Tyron said. The trio sat for lunch, and debated their top five rappers. The question: whether to include Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac. When one person omitted Biggie, Tyron said: “And I was just about to say I like you.”

At lunch, Tyron shared his plan — something he didn’t always have. Harvell was working on getting him placed in a Job Corps program, so that Tyron can complete it, get his record expunged, and join the Marines. Tyron said he wanted to leave Baltimore behind. But not entirely. Perhaps he could come back between deployments and volunteer with Roca. Harvell took the keys and drove Tyron back across town to his house.

Tyron asked Harvell about rejoining a Roca work crew to earn some money. At one point that day, he had mentioned the temptation to return to the streets to earn a living. “It’s so easy for me to get a pack (of heroin), or pick up a gun and start robbing [expletive],” Tyron said.

Miayan’s drug earnings were meager compared to some of the other Roca participants West and Harvell interact with. “These guys are earning $7,500 a day on that corner,” West said, pointing to a hot drug corner in West Baltimore. One young man there pulled his hoodie over his handgun when West pulled up on the corner. Sometimes, they tell West to stay away because there are too many guns out. For as entrenched these young men are in the drug economy, they don’t want anything to happen to their ally.

Tyron and Miayan are part of Baltimore’s street economy, but they’re not at the heart of it. If Baltimore is to curb violence, Roca also needs to reach those who are most entrenched so they can act as force multipliers in reducing violence. Convince a corner captain, for example, that violence on his block works against his interest, and he can impart that message to his crew.

A profitable drug corner is a target for guys who want to stick up dealers. As a result, many men on the corners are armed. They are often in jeopardy of facing long prison terms for their roles in the drug trade, or for carrying weapons to protect themselves from routine violence. And often they are in their late teens and early 20s, the exact age at which life in Baltimore is deadliest.

During the reporting of this story, federal agents served a warrant on a Roca participant. It wasn’t the first time that happened.

Heartbreak and hope

Emmanuel Holly entered Roca in early February. Holly was on home monitoring for a prior criminal conviction when his youth intervention specialist Anthony Scroggins first visited. The two played chess together and began to build a rapport. His ankle monitor kept the teen from venturing far. But shortly after his 18th birthday in late February, Holly successfully petitioned to have his monitor removed. His interactions with Scroggins became more sporadic, until April 18, when Holly was shot twice in the leg near the corner of Mount and Fayette streets.

On May 17, Holly died as a result of the gunshot wounds. He was the 119th homicide victim in the city in 2021.

For every Emmanuel Holly, there’s usually a Miayan. On a sunny Friday afternoon in May, the Roca office was full, lively after a year when the pandemic had limited indoor gatherings. Food lined a table, the staff decked out in Roca T-shirts and hats, and Miayan, now 20, accepted an award from the national organization for peacemaking.

He’s come a long way since his days outrunning the police: Drug free for a year, employed by Johns Hopkins Hospital in housekeeping for seven months. He opened his first bank account, and is saving for a car. Miayan thinks differently about time now. In years, instead of days. He plans to finish his high school diploma, and possibly get a commercial drivers license. Some of the guys from his old crew are facing federal indictment on drug charges. The case came down while he was in his coma.

During the presentation of the award, a video played. Much of it documented his recovery. There’s Miayan taking some of his earliest steps following his fall, doing squats to build back strength in his leg. West is in the frame, watching. The bond between the two can feel paternal. When Miayan stopped by the Roca office on his way to work a few weeks back, he cracked jokes with West, checking to see when he needed to leave for his job. His shift started at 3 p.m. He didn’t want to be late.

This article originally appeared at and is published in partnership with