A group of young activists from Teen Empowerment voiced their solutions to neighborhood violence and trauma with poems and plays written by themselves in the public hearing held Monday night by the new congresswoman Ayanna Pressley. More than a dozen people stood up to testify their trauma experiences as well as doubts and disappointment towards the system, including relatives and victims of gun violence. 

The "listening-only"() hearing held in the Boston City Hall is the last hearing by Pressley as a City Councilor before she goes to Capitol Hill. 

“You will always inform my advocacy, and that will certainly continue to be true as I head to Washington,” Pressley said to the audience before the testimony began, “because the people closest to the pain should be the closest to the power, driving and informing the policy-making.”

More than seven young people stood up to testify for more resources and better education, including members from the Center of Teen Empowerment Inc., a non-profit organization aiming at empowering youths from lower income and urban backgrounds. Most of the members at the hearing were from Grove Hall, Dorchester or Mattapan. The two neighborhoods are known for a high rate of gun violence. 

Florence Kallon from Mattapan advocated for education as a method to end the neighborhood violence she and her peers faced. 

“I’m 17 years old. I’ve been invited to more funerals than high school graduation,” Kallon said in her testimony and advocated more resource for education not only as a solution for gun violence but also for low college entrance rate, “So many black kids have given up because they do not think they will make it to 18.”

Carrie Mays, a senior in high school from Teen Empowerment, read one of her poems on her phone calling for more investments in schools for safe places in the neighborhood. In her poem, she described the school resources as limited and expensive:“But the prices ring the bell: they are not here for you.”

As those young people were grateful for the opportunity of sharing their own voices, they were also aware of the limitations of reality. 

“I’m happy that you’re the first black congresswoman, but we had a lot of 'first'. We had the first black president but our community didn’t get better,” one of the young people who lined up to testify later in the hearing said to Pressley.

Stephen Lafume, 20, from Mattapan, came to the event with his friend who’s in Teen Empowerment. Lafume shared in an interview that he viewed the hearing as“definitely more symbolic than for effectiveness.” In his testimony, he mentioned the location of hearing, Boston City Hall, is an inconvenient place for most of the people who have been impacted most by gun violence and trauma. 

“A lot of my community don’t have the privilege to come to the City Hall,” Lafume said in his testimony. 

Lafume shared after the event that he also wished there were more people looked like him in the room, as only two young black males attended the hearing, and “we are one fourths of the population who die every year from gun violence.”

Wilson Nguyen, 20, living in Grove Hall, Dorchester, is one of the members of Teen Empowerment. He said most of the testimonies from his peers during the hearing were definitely not prepared, yet they did briefly discuss before the hearing to “create a prompt.” Nguyen said one of the co-directors of their program brought information of the hearing to the whole group and strongly felt they should participate, as the topic of the hearing mirrors the type of discussion the group currently has. 

Nguyen mentioned that regardless of the money they are lacking at the moment, the group is trying to have more activities like workshops, discussions and open-mics to have “a strong community, a caring community” to prevent their peers from violence. 

Peter Lin-Marcus, 49, an activist from Chinatown said he saw a similarity between the young people at the hearing and the role of young people had in the Boston Miracle, a project in late 1990s that decreased the youth homicide rate in Boston to zero for two years. 

“What’s really important is that [those young people] are already trying to be part of the solution,” Lin-Marcus said, “Youth leadership is a big part of the solution. If we can built on what we have done before, we can actually do even better.”