Be the Change PHL (Bryan Lentz, co-founder; Movita Johnson-Harrell, founder of the CHARLES Foundation; Hassan Freeman, community activist)

TEDx Talk Topic: An inspired partnership to ending gun violence

Be the Change PHL, the citizen-driven campaign to end the epidemic of gun violence in Philadelphia, was born in part by the inspired curiosity of three very different community leaders to help solve the gun crisis, save lives, and create opportunity across Philadelphia.

Bryan Lentz, a prosecutor, was tasked as Chief of the Philadelphia Regional Gun Violence Task Force, with finding innovative solutions to Philadelphia’s gun violence. Movita Johnson-Harrell’s son Charles had been killed in a case of mistaken identity, and she vowed to do everything possible to stop other mothers from having to experience the pain of losing a son. And Hassan Freeman, after spending his late teens and all of his 20s in prison for a shooting committed in 1988, vowed to dedicate his energy once free to helping other young men avoid the terrible mistakes he had made. The answer that united the three was Focused Deterrence, a program developed by David Kennedy, a leading American criminologist and professor at John Jay College in New York, and detailed at length in his 2011 book, Don’t Shoot: One Man, a Street Fellowship, And the End of Violence in Inner-City America.

Be The Change PHL is a movement to support the awareness, sustainment, and expansion of Focused Deterrence in Philadelphia, where a pilot program in South Philadelphia produced remarkable results in the reduction of shootings in a short period of time.The group seeks to harness support for this strategy to reduce violence, to make it a cornerstone issue of public dialogue, and to partner with the City to grow the program and provide critical social services in impacted neighborhoods.