Sharon Brown planned to release balloons in neighborhoods where Jacksonians had lost their lives to gun violence after she was hired to lead the city’s fledgling Office of Violence Prevention and Trauma Recovery in early June. 

Her goal was to show these communities that someone cares enough to meet them where they are. But she never got that far. 

Instead, the longtime community activist said she found herself swamped by the demands of the city’s bureaucracy, such as figuring out how to submit a purchase order for pens or reminding the police department to send her the names of relatives of the recently deceased, so she could bring them candles, flowers and a pamphlet with resources. 

What Brown did manage to accomplish in her month leading the office — cleaning a city-owned building that will be the site of a youth engagement center downtown — was through sheer will. 

“Their process impedes progress,” Brown said of the city. 

Acknowledging this reality, Brown was nonplussed when Mayor John Horhn let her go, along with other hires made by the outgoing administration under Chokwe Antar Lumumba, days after Horhn took office July 1.

“I came in doing the work, and I’m going to leave doing the work,” she said. 

Jackson officials say the office will continue working to decrease violence in Jackson through non-police interventions under a new name, the Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement. It will once again be led by Keisha Coleman, a trauma therapist who was allegedly fired in the midst of the city’s peace initiative by Lumumba’s chief of staff for speaking with Horhn at a campaign rally earlier this year. 

“We’re aligning with the current mayor John Horhn’s vision, but the mission is the same,” Coleman said, “and that is to create programming and support programming that is already happening in the community to reduce the likelihood of gun violence.” 

This restart comes as Jackson has recently experienced a spate of shootings that Jackson Police Chief Joseph Wade said are driven by gangs of young men.

In one of her first efforts back at the helm, Coleman is working with Jackson State University and other organizations in the city to host a gala this Friday in partnership with a student club, JSU Votes’ Girls Against Gun Violence. 

“If you know someone or if you have someone related to you who you know needs some type of help, come out,” JSU professor Jacobi Grant, who is working with the club, said at a press conference at City Hall on Monday. 

The gala will be followed by a brunch Sunday at the Two Mississippi Museums to discuss violence in Jackson’s Black communities. 

“Gun violence remains one of our most urgent issues facing families and young people,” Horhn said at the press conference. 

Lumumba launched the office in 2023 with $700,000 in grant funding from the National League of Cities, a nonprofit organization, to tackle the root causes of violence in Jackson such as poverty and trauma.

But that grant funding will end in September, so Coleman said she is working on more grant applications and a request for a little over $500,000 from the City Council. Coleman said she hopes to use those funds to host classes focused on parenting and job readiness. She also wants to create a “community consortium” to get input from neighborhood associations, faith leaders, mental health professionals and youth in the city.

“The message that we want to send is there is a seat at the table for every member of the community,” she said. 

Coleman said the council allocated $202,000 last year to renovate the defunct Mary C. Jones center to house youth engagement programming, but that she was unable to spend the funds. She hopes to regain access to that money. Her goal is to get the center up and running by next year – a timeline that she said makes the city’s building maintenance skeptical.

“I’m being optimistic saying we’re gonna be in there mid-fall, but when I say that the people doing renovations kind of give me a side eye,” Coleman said. 

When Brown led the office, she experienced similar frustrations with the delay in reopening Mary C. Jones, because she had a hard time finding a company to bid on the project. 

So she bought her own buckets and mops and rallied volunteers, including youth who were being mentored by Strong Arms of Mississippi, a credible messenger organization which received a grant from the office under Coleman. 

To Brown, the crisis of violence in Jackson is too urgent to wait for government processes such as requests for proposals or official death notifications. 

“If we’re talking about changing the trajectory of violence, people need to know that people really care,” she said. “The conditions have always been the same. We have always been in poverty, but what has changed is people don’t feel connected and loved anymore.” 

Since leaving the city, Brown has been working on renovating several homes in her neighborhood, “The Bottom,” to create unofficial respites. She’s linked up with the People’s Advocacy Institute – the nonprofit group founded by Lumumba’s sister, Rukia Lumumba – to start a new organization that aims to tackle violence not just in Jackson, but statewide. 

She’s calling it the Mississippi Office of Violence Prevention and Trauma Recovery.