Thomas Howard / The Meridian StarDr. Ashley Williams talks to community leaders and stakeholders Tuesday about Project Inspire, a youth mentorship and gun violence prevention program she developed at the University of South Alabama hospital, at Ochsner Rush Health.

Medical staff, community leaders and elected officials gathered Tuesday evening at Ochsner Rush Health to hear how to new youth mentorship program at the University of South Alabama called Project Inspire is helping kids escape gun violence.

Dr. Jason DeFatta, who works as a trauma surgeon at Ochsner Rush Health, said he has grown increasingly concerned about gun violence in Meridian having seen the effects first-hand in the trauma ward. As he and his wife worked to raise five children in the city, he said he felt led to do something to help the community.

“I’m raising five children in this city, and I want to put roots down in this city,” he said. “Meridian has such great opportunities. What can we do?”

After hearing about Project Inspire, DeFatta said he got in contact with the program’s architect, Dr. Ashley Williams, to learn more about what the program does and brainstorm how it could be adapted to Meridian.

Project Inspire, Williams said, is a program that combines youth intervention, mentorship and career development to help at-risk youth break free of gun violence. Beginning in 2018, the three week program has graduated two classes prior to the pandemic and is looking to start its third class soon.

“The whole focus is to provide teens who are delinquent of gun crimes with education, exposure, opportunity and, most importantly, mentors,” she said.

Project Inspire participants are recommended to the program by youth court judges in Mobile, Williams said. The program starts off with the teens seeing the impact of gun violence first hand in USA’s Trauma Ward, building that report with the doctor and hospital staff who will mentor them throughout the next few weeks.

Williams said heavy emphasis is placed on educational and professional development, including resume building, mock interviews, GED and ACT preparation and aptitude testing to help the teens find their strengths.

“A lot of them are so far removed that they don’t have the experience and exposure to know what they want to do,” she said.

The program also includes activities such as laser tag, guest speakers who can connect with the teens’ trauma and a graduation ceremony with family and friends. The goal, Williams said, is to help the teens understand they are not alone and that they have more options than they knew.

“The whole goal is to really build this relationship,” she said. “It’s not enough to have them come in and shadow you, but you really have to open that line of communication and get them to trust you and you to trust them.”

Helping the teens, however, is not enough, Williams said.

A survey of 75 children, she said, showed the majority of them carry guns for protection and feel not having a gun would result in their deaths. Understanding how the children view the situation, she said, shows how telling children not to carry guns will not be effective if the underlying community issues are not addressed.

“We are asking them to do the impossible,” she said. “It’s not enough to say guns can hurt you, guns can kill you, you don’t need to carry a gun. But how do we equip them, how do we resource them, how to we enable them to not carry guns?”

In her research, Williams said she found the same social and economic indicators that predict poor health outcomes, such as single-parent homes, abandoned properties and economic stability, are identical to the indicators for gun violence. Much like treating a chronic disease, she said addressing gun violence will require both treatment of the symptoms and preventative efforts to stop the violence from spreading.

In the four years since Project Inspire was stated, Williams said only one participant had fallen back into a criminal lifestyle. At USA, she said, the data has shown the project is feasible and effective, and now the goal is moving toward scaling the program to include more students and expansion into community-wide mentorship.

The eventual goal, she said, is to be able to offer the program for youth judges to use as an alternative sentence to jail time.

DeFatta hopes to bring Project Inspire to Meridian in the future, and plans are already underway to get that done. Successful implementation, he said, will take time and effort from the community, doctors and youth judges to both figure out the logistics and find common ground between hundreds of Alabama’s and Mississippi’s laws.

Project Inspire is not the only solution, DeFatta said, and work has already begun on a second front called Project Unite. Meridian has no shortage of departments, community groups and after school programs to help guide wayward youth, he said and under Project Unite all of those groups could come together to coordinate their efforts under one banner.

“If we come together and unite all of our resources, the sky’s the limit,” he said.

Work to launch both programs is ongoing, DeFatta said, and while it might take a while to get things up and running, he optimistically plans to have Project Unite started later this year and looks to kick off Meridian’s version of Project Inspire in Spring 2023.