Solving Gun Violence: A'Dorian Murray-Thomas

Karly Scholz 0:01

Welcome to Solving Gun Violence, a weekly student led podcast from the University of Virginia's gun violence solution projects that tackles one of America's most urgent issues preventing gun violence. Each episode will feature experts sharing actionable solutions to improve community safety while upholding individual rights. My name is Karly Scholz. I'm a fourth year at the University of Virginia, and your student host today. This episode features a conversation with A'Dorian Murray-Thomas, a powerful voice in youth leadership, education, equity and community driven violence prevention. A'Dorian is the Commissioner for Newark's District Two, and the founder of SHE Wins Inc., a leadership and mentoring organization for girls affected by gun violence. A former educator and nationally recognized advocate A'Dorian, has been honored by the Obama White House, the NAACP and Glamor magazine for her work at the intersection of healing, justice and civic engagement. We discuss what it means to lead with lived experience, the role of young women in driving change, how faith and ethics shape her public service, and what it takes to reimagine safety and opportunity in cities like Newark. If you're interested in practical, evidence based solutions and the future of gun violence prevention, you're in the right place. Let's dive in.

Karly Scholz 1:38 

A'Dorian, thank you so much for being here.

A’Dorian Murray-Thomas 1:40 

Thanks for having me. Karly.

Karly Scholz 1:42 

Through your work with she wins, which is so amazing, what have the girls and women that you've mentored taught you about what it means to grow into leadership after experiencing loss?

A’Dorian Murray-Thomas 1:53 

Thank you for that, and thank you just for having me and all the hard work that you guys put into making this podcast possible. I love that framing grow into leadership, because so often we don't think about how much of our own stories, our stories of becoming require growth, require time. Most of the young people in our organization come to us as gun violence survivors or survivors of other forms of trauma, bullying, sexual assault, frankly, being a young girl in the 21st century and trying to figure out how to survive in that skin and those shoes and so what we like to do is create space, one for just being, space where our young people and our young girls can just be who they are without apology, trying different things with their hair, trying out different skill sets, developing different talents, getting into talent shows and being involved in community service, just giving them opportunities to be. What we find is that when young people and particularly those affected by trauma, but frankly, the research shows that this is true for every population of young persons, when young people are allowed to just be and then are also given cultivated target opportunities to develop skill sets that help them see their voice and how their voice can be used to impact change. They do just exactly as you said. They grow into leadership. And they grow into leadership by first sitting with the complexity and the beauty of their own stories, stories that sometimes involve trauma, but that also involve triumph, and from there, the basis of their leadership grows.

Karly Scholz 3:23 

Thank you so much for that. Could you tell us a little bit more about your own story and how you got into this work?

A’Dorian Murray-Thomas 3:28 

Absolutely. So my mother, who's here with us in the studio today, so so glad she came and joined. Raised me and my cousin, actually, and as an only child, though, primarily, I was allowed to get away with a lot of things,but never allowed to get away without learning. And our lives were very, very normal in Newark until it wasn't when one day, my father, who was literally on his way to go pay my school tuition, was robbed and killed two blocks from my house. And so at the age of seven, I became a homicide survivor by the grace of God, having a mother who not only made sure that she provided for me in the middle of everything I was going through, but also literally led a life committed to providing for other people, as a teacher, as a social worker, as someone who worked with young people who were in the foster care system, I got to see from an early age that even if you were exposed to some of the horrors of life, or what life could offer you could actually be a part of making sure that other people didn't have to suffer alone. And so that's kind of how I got into service, really, by virtue of being around someone whose entire life was service, which was my mom, and that took me to, you know, I remember being in high school, I had the opportunity to go to a small boarding school in Western Massachusetts, even though I grew up in Newark and being able to be educated with and from some of the best teachers in the country, of classmates from across the world, and then coming home to visit friends, some of which went to amazing schools in our city. Others who even we were seniors in high school, had no idea what the SAT was, because they didn't go to schools that were teaching that. And at 17, got a few of my friends together and created a free SAT prep program that helped kids get ready for the SAT and learn how to, you know, write college essays. These are the things we started doing as kids, because we realized that even as a young person, and in fact, as a young person, you were particularly equipped to be a part of the change that you wanted to see. And it didn't take an age, it didn't take a degree or a background to be a part of changing these issues that, unfortunately, we didn't create, but we did inherit and had a responsibility to help solve. And that's really kind of how I jump started my life's, you know, kind of direction, if you will, into service, by being around someone who's dedicated to that, by starting with my friends and then allowing that to kind of take me to all these other really beautiful journeys.

Karly Scholz 5:53 

I hear so much agency in your story, and young people really stepping up like yourself to help each other and help their peers. How do you feel like your story and the stories of women that you work with challenge the typical narrative of a young person impacted by gun violence that we hear in the media and then those stories the media perpetuates?

A’Dorian Murray-Thomas 6:14 

Yeah, the truth is that there isn't one story to any story of survival when you look at survivors of gun violence, when you look at survivors of sexual trauma, when you look at the list, kind of goes on. There are always multiple stories of how people work through what they've gone through. And in fact, what you find is that when we make space for the multiplicity of our stories, that's when we get the real story. I think one of the things that's more common in my story, to even other stories of gun violence survival, is what you know we like to call my faith tradition, that the ram in the bush, but this idea that even in the middle of so much turmoil and so much darkness, somehow, some way, people find their way through and so in my case, it was through my mother and through me as a young person, Being able to discover my own voice and my own power, and seeing that I could actually be a part of making sure that other young people affected by gun violence wouldn't have to be affected alone, and that, frankly, when I was 23 years old and ran for school board, this is after I had been running my nonprofit she wins that works with young women affected by gun violence, for years, I was actually really nervous to run for office. One of my mentees at the time who I had encouraged to run for student government in class, she said, Well, Mr. Dorian, you encouraged me to run for school government. You should run too. And when I remember kind of thinking about whether or not I was going to run, I was like the guy who took my father's life was a kid himself. What would it have looked like if he went to a school where he was educated, where he was poured into, where he got mental health services instead of suspensions, it's possible he wouldn't have had his hands on a gun. And so I realized that through service at the micro and macro level right creating direct service opportunities for people affected by violence and who are survivors, but also working at the macro level to create systemic responses to change you can be impactful. And I think that going back to this point around the ram in the bush, so many people who are survivors are doing something. They're making the best with what they have to not only survive, but to help other people get through too, and that's that story of resiliency, that story of agency is often lost in our narratives around gun violence. People do not just kind of passively receive or rather say as victims to these issues. People do something with their stories that needs to be shared more.

Karly Scholz 8:40 

I really hear that you've built SHE Wins around the idea that young women impacted by gun violence, despite this really dark and difficult systemic issue, have something really powerful to offer to their communities. How do you balance creating a space for grief and processing these really difficult things while also cultivating that sense of agency and girls that you work with.

A’Dorian Murray-Thomas 9:06 

That's a good one. Carly, ooh, yeah, that's really good. You stumped me a little bit on that, because that's honestly something I've been trying to be more intentional about. I've started, I started SHE Wins at 19. You know, I'm 29 now, right? So I'm like, my all my teens, all my 20s really have been to my work, and a work that isn't like just a career, you know, it's like a life calling, and it's deeply involved. It's deeply personal, right? I can't go to the grocery store, I can't drive past a bus stop, I can't go into a school and not see someone I know in my community who I've touched or who's touched me, and be responsible to them, just as a you know, know that I am responsible to them, and so I think this balance between your calling and like self care is really important. There's also a lot of work around trauma studies that reveal that we and we, collectively, as you know, the human race, when you are experiencing trauma, particularly. Severe levels of trauma, you're never really out of it. It's this kind of ongoing cycle that can revisit and re kind of reshape and retool the innermost parts of your beings, even when you're not aware. And so that requires a sitting, that requires a stillness, that requires surrendering to this idea that there is a certain unknowability about trauma, there's a certain unknowability about about survival, there's a certain unknowability about the complexity of our own stories. And we have to just accept that that is a thing, and that will constantly be working through the thing, because the thing is constantly working through us. The reality is that we have to kind of accept that, work through that, and kind of use that as an anchor. So I try to strike a balance between knowing that, okay, this is what I can do, this is what I understand, and these are the boundaries of what I can understand right now about my own self and my own healing, right? But I must try, and I also have to be still sometimes too, because sometimes it's in the stillness when the solutions surface and reach you.

Karly Scholz 11:07 

Mentorship is often framed as a one way street, but from your journey, it suggests something being much more mutual, where you see people you've worked with at school and at the grocery store in your community. Has there been a moment when a young woman and she wins shifted your own understanding of justice and leadership, what did they show you that you didn't see before?

A’Dorian Murray-Thomas 11:28 

Yeah, absolutely. Oh, there's so many. But I think what comes to mind is just the overall willingness to keep pushing into like never give up on oneself, even when you're going through such unthinkable circumstances. I think of working with young people during the height of COVID girls and gender expansive youth who, you know, buried their parents in masks, children who in our city were in remote learning for almost two years, children, some of which in my organization, who had to stay in homes that were not safe before COVID and weren't safe after, and yet still graduated high school, you know, and yet still looked after their siblings. And so I think the ongoing kind of lesson for me from young people? I know this isn't fully answer your question, if I could probably think more about a specific example, but like this ongoing sense that our young people can and will and do make a way out of no way and so often, when you know the mainstream narratives talk about young people and youth today, they say, Oh, well, young people don't care. They're on their phone, they're disconnected. I'm like, that's not true. You know, young people are learning and they're disrupting, and they're surviving from their phones from home, right? And that type of agency and that resiliency that we see in youth is really important. But secondly, I'd add this to my young people have given me the language around things that I didn't really have access to growing up, right? Language around mental health, language around self care, I think I've been able to take those things more seriously and my own personal life and my career, and certainly within the trauma informed framework of she wins because of honest conversations with our kids who are like, Hey, I can't do this because I'm not well, and us having to take that seriously, and even though my generation, like I'm not very much removed from them, generationally, but my parent is right, my mother is, and their parents are, and their teachers are, and so they give us tools to better, not only take care of ourselves, but create more trauma, informed systems more broadly from their own courage.

Karly Scholz 13:37 

You've been both an educator and an elected official, which are two professions that both really felt the weight of the pandemic and and engaged with young people all the time. What connections do you see between public education and public safety, particularly when it comes to breaking cycles of violence?

A’Dorian Murray-Thomas 13:56 

That it's public, which means that it's the people's power. It is the people's equal agency in these systems to create the solutions. And thirdly, that, because it's public, it is intersecting, right? So you can't talk about public safety, nor can you talk about public education and not talk about poverty and not talk about employment and not talk about climate justice and not talk about air quality, air pollution, right? Like all of these things that we experience in the public affect us in our public institutions. And so equity and schooling, just like justice and just like lower violence and public safety, has to be an intersectional conversation and an interdisciplinary solution. So I'm so proud to you know, she wins. We do really incredible work, and frankly, work that's still growing and work that we're still learning and tweaking and improving things on in the space of empowering young people to use their stories to create social change. But we don't do this in a vacuum, because you know that public issues require public and intersecting. Solutions. So we work with organizations like the Newark Office of Violence Prevention that makes sure that organizations like ours that are trying to be proactive and not reactive in issues of violence reduction and public safety are working in concert with other orgs committed to that work. Our young people have been in trainings with police officers on trauma informed care and trauma informed responses to public safety, so that both young people, children, parents and officers can be in the same room, developing language for trauma, knowing what trauma is, knowing what trauma recovery look like, looks like, knowing how trauma shows up in our bodies, for the officers in their work, for our kids in their schools, and how we can be together in space to figure out how to be more trauma informed in the work that we do, so that we don't repeat cycles of harm that could actually be cycles of healing. Public means intersecting. It means working in concert, and it means knowing that there's no one silver bullet solution to these systemic, interconnected issues.

Karly Scholz 16:03 

A lot of your work has also been around restorative justice and alternative education. How did those experiences inform how you think about accountability and prevention when it comes to youth involved in gun violence?

A’Dorian Murray-Thomas 16:16 

I mean, I remember a girl who came to us she had been suspended for school, for causing, like, a physical, like, fight brawl, and her high school, and in one day, we're running group with her. And I talked to her, and I said, well, like, what happened? Like, how did you even end up here? She said, the night before my brother was gunned down on our porch, he died in my hands. So the next day at school, I went off on the first person I saw, right? This is what I'm saying about interconnected issues that I've learned from working restorative justice and working in the alternative education space. And shout out to organizations like the Opportunity Youth Network that I worked with, and they do incredible work across the country with Youth Build opportunity youth issues more broadly, folks like them, myself, so many of us in this work understand that the issues affecting our young people are issues affecting whole communities and whole lives. And so if we don't treat these issues from the root right, gun violence, if we if we look at it at a granular level, we're talking about multiple issues affecting things in multiple different ways, and these look like issues of equity in education, issues of poverty and poverty eradication, issues of opportunities to gain full employment, issues of healthcare, issues of quality of life, issues to our kids and our organization, and in fact, the high school that this young person went to where the largest green space in her neighborhood is a cemetery, right? If we don't take seriously that systemic issues require systemic solutions, then we're actually missing the problem.

Karly Scholz 17:54 

Part of what makes gun violence such a pressing issue that is that it reaches everyone, young people, old people, all people in the United States in very different ways. But of course, it impacts some communities much more than than others. And you've spoken about the importance of centering black girls and leadership and healing work. How do you see gender and race influence the way communities experience and respond to gun violence?

A’Dorian Murray-Thomas 18:19 

Ooh, such an incredible question. I mean, there's a few ways I can answer this, but I'll say, when you look at the data, in most communities, in most families, the ones who are either if they're not the head of household and like single family homes, or even if it's two parent homes, the people who are keeping the engines running moving the things forward are women, period. And it's not a slight to men, it's just that the data shows that women in households and companies and communities get things done. They hold things together. But what happens when girls are forced to have responsibilities carry weights of women, girls who are children, still becoming right, have to hold these pressures of healing themselves and helping heal their parents who just lost a child or a spouse to gun violence or being in schools where you're one of the smartest ones in the class, but if you raise your hand and start talking, start talking, you may get picked out on or picked on or called out for being right. What happens when our girls have to carry issues that no adult should be carrying, but girls have to carry them all the same, race, gender, class, sexuality, gender differences. I'm thinking about young people in my organization who came into our organizations with pronouns of she, her, hers and now they're they, them, right our young people, who are most at the margins of so many different areas of difference and identity, their stories are multi fold. Their stories serve as these spaces. Where so many different issues come to light, but also so many different opportunities as well. Because even from being at the margins, even from being often isolated or often alone or often having to carry the weight of the world, they still thrive. They still do well in school, and still are awesome big siblings, and still go really hard in sports and still give back to their communities. We have to at once sit with the heaviness of the weight that our girls, and particularly our girls who are differently, marginalized because of race, sexuality, class, et cetera. We have to at once deal with the weight of what it means to be a girl in such complex skin and still thrive despite and we can't, like, look at our girls and Marvel and just be like, Wow, she's amazing. We have to be like, how do we create a world where our girls don't have to be so amazing in the first place?

Karly Scholz 21:01 

You've worked to cultivate that in your community. You're so ingrained in Newark and had so many different roles, and Newark also has a long history of these community based approaches to public safety. From your vantage point as a commissioner and your work in the community, what lessons should national leaders be learning from local efforts in cities like Newark?

A’Dorian Murray-Thomas 21:22 

Start local, start local, start local, focus, local. You know, the Poli Sci hat in Me thinks back to, you know, Tocqueville, right? And he's coming and visiting the United States for the first time. And he's like, look at these local town halls and look at these. There's so much happening at the local level, certainly, if I can be frankly, when we don't know what the heck is going on going on in our federal government, if we're not reminded now more than ever that at the local level, really incredible things are happening, and have always been happening, because that's when folks are closer to the ground. We have to invest locally. We have to invest in local leaders. We have to invest in the voices, the stories and the agencies of young people. That's what I think national leaders should be paying attention to. Newark is not unique in our incredible work on anti gun violence and community based responses to gun violence prevention, but we are unique in that we were the first city in the state of New Jersey to create a city government office for community based gun violence prevention. And then our state house, our governor went and created one at the state legislature, because he's like, oh, there's some great stuff happening there locally, right? And you look in Baltimore, I mean, there's so many of the cities and examples where really great work is happening at the local level. We've got to start paying attention to what local folks are doing and then investing in them with our dollars, investing in them with our ideas, and certainly keeping them in prayer, if you were a spiritual person, or keeping them in you know, whatever ways of support from afar, because it's not easy, but it's literally changing and saving lives.

Karly Scholz 22:54 

You've been working in the world of gun violence prevention since you were really young. You work with young people who are also doing really amazing work. What gives you hope right now, especially in the face of continued violence, and what would you say to other young people who want to make a difference but don't know where to start?

A’Dorian Murray-Thomas 23:10 

I think I get a lot of hope in my young people, in the fact that they still find joy and create joy, and still find time to give back while they're holding so much themselves, I find a lot of joy in art. There's such great art being created, from music to television to books to fiction, and art does this has this kind of mystical power of allowing us to still be able to dream. And there's so much incredible art being created, and it gives me a lot of joy. I'm a big music head, and there's like, great music coming out, and James Baldwin, he talks about how the artist's job is to tell the truth. We have a lot of artists telling the truth, telling the truth in ways that other folks can't, elected officials or universities, and there are ways in which certain folks are constrained, and art kind of reveals this different moral imaginary, as some would like to say, so young people, their agency, the truth that lives in the art that surround us gives us a lot of hope. And frankly, the fact that folks like you guys exist, right, and that we get to be in rooms like this, having conversations like this at a time such as this, you know, creating an archive of a podcast is an archive, right? When we live at a time where there's systemic attacks on memory, systemic attacks on archives, on information, people don't want things to be talked about. People don't want things to be recorded or even discussed or remember, right? So having real conversations about complex issues is something that gives me a lot of hope, too.

Karly Scholz 24:37 

You're currently pursuing a master of divinity and social ethics. How does your faith and your ethical framework influence your approach to policy making and advocacy around violence prevention?

A’Dorian Murray-Thomas 24:47

That's a great question. I mean, it's interesting, you know, to to say and to be, you know, proud to be a Christian at a time where Christian nationalism is being weaponized against school communities and. Against marginalized racial groups, gender groups. It feels like an oxymoron to say this is a faith that I'm proud of, and yet I recognize how much harm that folks who claim to be a part of this faith have done and continue to do that. Said I understand that faith is something that exceeds religion. You know, faith is something that's about this stubborn commitment to what's possible when people realize that we're far more connected than we are part and that, to me, transcends race, religion, faith, tradition, et cetera. But what I really am really proud of though to be out of in a faith in social justice learning community where people from all walks of faith, folks who are identified as Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, folks who don't believe in any religion at all, can come together and have really tough and beautiful and necessary conversations about, how do we create a world just a little bit better than the one that we inherited?

Karly Scholz 26:00 

I think the stubborn commitment to what's possible is a really powerful line, and you found your community among among those people, what is the solution to gun violence look like in the United States?

A’Dorian Murray-Thomas 26:12 

Oh, the solution to gun violence looks multi fold. It looks interconnected. It looks like systemic responses to systemic issues. We have to start with young people. We have to start with intergenerational approaches. We have to start with quality of life. If we make people's lives more livable, then people will be less likely to do gut wrenching things to survive. Secondly, if we make more of our public systems, from our public schools to all public systems that people have to interact with more trauma informed, where people also learn how to handle conflict, people will be less likely to resort to violence and more likely to use their voice and their values in different ways. This isn't necessarily exactly related to gun violence, but something that I'm really proud of in Newark is that we just passed an ordinance called vote 16, which gives young people as early as the age of 16 years old to vote in their school board elections. We're the first city in the state of New Jersey to do this. We're the second largest city in the country outside of Oakland to do this. And this is important to me, because it's giving young people the opportunity to take their futures and their educations in their own hands. And that's what gun violence prevention looks like, too. Our young people, your generation and younger, have seen more school shootings than we've ever seen in this country. You guys know the trauma of gun violence too. How are we putting you guys and your voices and your stories also at the helm of finding their solutions?

Karly Scholz 27:52 

A'Dorian, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you so much. Where can the audience find you?

A’Dorian Murray-Thomas 27:57 

I'm on the socials. Y'all I'm on all the things. So I'm on Instagram at A'Dorian for Newark. I'm on Tiktok at A'Dorian for Newark as well. I just started at substack to actually start writing things to put on there. But yeah, I'm on all the things. And just would love to stay in community with you guys. This has been amazing, and this entire community that you guys have created is amazing as well. And I'm just truly looking forward to staying in touch.

Karly Scholz 28:21 

Well, we are so lucky to have you for more information. You can also find more on the gun violence solution projects website, and we'll see you next week.