Article About 'Gangs and Guns' Youth Conference
On the 14th September The CDI organised a youth conference on ‘Gangs and Guns’. Half the delegates were young people - from this area and a youth project in Birmingham and the others community workers connected in some way with youth work.
Half and hour after the conference was due to start, the youths were rather thin on the ground and frantic phone calls were being made, possibly to get them out of bed. However it was well worth the wait when the first speaker started speaking. Beth and Marsha had succeeded in getting two of the countries leading experts to talk about the problems with gangs and youth violence.
The first speaker was Professor Gus John, I have rarely been so captivated by a lecture. Gus John was started as a Dominican friar from Black Friars who decided against a career in the church because he believed he could do more good in other areas. He had a background of working for the ‘Oxford Council of Racial integration’ and he worked with migrant workers from the Carribean.
His presentation, with emotive titled slides such as “Guns, gangs and the walking dead” was about how death by shooting is now a “routine experience”. He was speaking, not as a remote academic but as someone whose life, family and community had been affected. He talked about young people whose only experience of funerals was their friends, the described people he knew from his home in Manchester. Friends’ children, his son’s friends, who had been killed or bereaved by violent attacks, the sense of bewilderment and desolation of a woman who was about to give birth to the child of a friend of his sons who had been murdered.
What I found so engaging about Professor Gus John as a speaker was that he had the understanding of the academic theories and statistics but was also came across as passionate, angry and desperate to find an answer to this problem in society. A lot of the stories he told were in an almost disbelieving tone, even after all his experience and
Half and hour after the conference was due to start, the youths were rather thin on the ground and frantic phone calls were being made, possibly to get them out of bed. However it was well worth the wait when the first speaker started speaking. Beth and Marsha had succeeded in getting two of the countries leading experts to talk about the problems with gangs and youth violence.
The first speaker was Professor Gus John, I have rarely been so captivated by a lecture. Gus John was started as a Dominican friar from Black Friars who decided against a career in the church because he believed he could do more good in other areas. He had a background of working for the ‘Oxford Council of Racial integration’ and he worked with migrant workers from the Carribean.
His presentation, with emotive titled slides such as “Guns, gangs and the walking dead” was about how death by shooting is now a “routine experience”. He was speaking, not as a remote academic but as someone whose life, family and community had been affected. He talked about young people whose only experience of funerals was their friends, the described people he knew from his home in Manchester. Friends’ children, his son’s friends, who had been killed or bereaved by violent attacks, the sense of bewilderment and desolation of a woman who was about to give birth to the child of a friend of his sons who had been murdered.
What I found so engaging about Professor Gus John as a speaker was that he had the understanding of the academic theories and statistics but was also came across as passionate, angry and desperate to find an answer to this problem in society. A lot of the stories he told were in an almost disbelieving tone, even after all his experience and