The Newark Community Street Team disrupts conflicts before they become violent by building strong relationships with young people.
Shadee Dukes didn't quite know what to say during a press conference last week about an initiative to reduce violence in Newark.
He doesn't do prepared remarks, but he also didn't know how deep he should get about himself and why he's a part of the Newark Community Street Team (NCST), an on-the-ground contingent of men and women assembled last year by Mayor Ras Baraka to head off incidents that could turn deadly.
"I'm just ready to get out here and do work,'' Dukes said, as a way of explaining why he joined the group.
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The street team, which now has 17 members, claims among its ranks former gang members, men returning home from jail and neighborhood community leaders. With funding from philanthropic foundations, NCST members have been trained to diffuse conflicts and offer alternatives, such as social services that steer young people toward employment, education, life skills and peaceful conflict resolution. They concentrate this work in the West and South wards, areas that the city has identified as its most troubled neighborhoods.
"We're trying to transform people's lives,'' Baraka said. "We're not pretending that we don't have problems. We have to take responsibility for what's happening in our community.''
Dukes, 30, wasn't a gang member when he met the street team last year. He wasn't raising hell in the neighborhood, either. But he was taking responsibility for his South Ward community when NCST took him under its wing.
That's the part he left out at the podium, where Baraka asked a few street team members to say a few words during the press conference to announce that the team was starting up again. It ran out of funding for a six month period, but many of the members stayed in contact with young people.
At the time Dukes befriended the street team, he was was unemployed, having been laid off from a job as a warehouse worker. Until something better came along, he was organizing events to give school supplies to kids through Clean Money Family, a neighborhood group he started in 2014 with his buddy, Moses Beasley, who would be fatally shot in 2015.
This is how Dukes wisely spent his days - a far cry from earlier times when he was hanging on the streets and getting high, destructive behavior that NCST tries to discourage when approaching young people in the neighborhood.
Had the NCST been around in 2008, Dukes said he probably would not have bought a gun to protect himself after he was shot in the leg when someone tried to rob him and Beasley.
The street team looks to help kids still in school and young adults, some who maybe ex-offenders, make better decisions; its members serving as mentors to provide options and to temper frustrations that could lead to violence and bad choices. They talk to these young Newark residents constantly, and when the academic year resumes, they'll be walking kids to and from school and checking in with young men and women who may need their counsel.
"We act as interrupters, we act as mentors, we act as mediators - in our capacity - to help people to resolve conflicts among themselves,'' said Aqeela Sherrills, the project director, who brokered a truce between the Bloods and Crips gangs in Los Angeles in 1992, while living in Watts. "We can't arrest our way out of this problem.''
Dukes, unfortunately, was arrested an hour after he bought that gun on the street in 2008. He spent a year in jail, a decision that cost him his license to drive school buses when he was locked up in 2010. After his release in 2011, Dukes said he bounced around in warehouse packing jobs for a few years and had been out of work several months when he began taking part in NCST activities. He liked what they were offering, how they were trying to make a difference with a consistent street presence, conversation and help.
"We're not going to go to one corner of an area once,'' said Nate Burkhard, a NCST program coordinator. "We're going to continue to do this and get them comfortable with the services we provide.''
NCST placed Dukes on the organization caseload to help him find employment. In a twist of fortune, NCST found Dukes the right gig - it hired him to be a mentor last year.
"It's not a job for me,'' Dukes said. "It's a lifestyle.''
It's a mindset he passes on to young people - one that emphasizes they have to take responsibility for their lives.
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"What I try to offer them is more tools to put inside of their tool box, and more options to handle situations - besides violence and irrational thinking,'' Dukes said.
Douglas Freeman, chairman of the South Ward Republican Committee, has seen Dukes' impact in the short time that he's been with the NCST and Clean Money Family.
When Dukes organized a meeting for the backpack give-away, Freeman said, 40 young men, his age and younger, showed up.
"They wanted to give back to their neighborhood,'' Freeman said. "You could see the glow in their eyes.''
Leading by example has caught fire with Dukes.
Last June, he sought to augment his neighborhood resume that has him entrenched with NCST and Clean Money Family. He ran for South Ward district leader, thinking he didn't have much of a chance.
Residents thought otherwise.
He won.
And so did NCST when it brought Dukes into the fold last year.
Barry Carter: (973) 836-4925 or bcarter@starledger.com or nj.com/carter or follow him on Twitter @BarryCarterSL