When Robbin Carroll bought a home in Englewood with plans to turn it into a center for promoting peace, she was met with skepticism from some in a community that had been hit hard by poverty and violence.
She did that in part by hiring a local contractor not only to fix up the house but to train Englewood residents in carpentry.
“I couldn’t sit back and watch people in this city be OK with poverty and violence day after day,” said Carroll, who worked in jewelry sales before becoming a yoga teacher and starting I Grow Chicago. She said she was inspired to work in Englewood after hearing Liberian Nobel Peace Prize winner Leymah Gbowee talk in Chicago a few years ago.
More importantly, the violence on the block and the community is trending downward. In 2014, the police beat that includes the Peace House saw four murders, police data shows. While that spiked to ten in a very violent 2016, there have been no murders in the beat in 2017 or 2018. The larger Englewood Police District overall saw a similar trend, with murders down from 86 in 2016 to 49 last year. There have been nine so far this year, data shows. While there have been no murders on the block since it opened, there have been shootings, including one last month.
“I grew up here [in Englewood], and I’m not going anywhere. People should come to the Peace House and see how we’ve helped people,” Mables said.
Baskin “laid the groundwork for a lot of these nonprofits that you see in 2018. His organization was responsible for negotiating and ending a lot of gang wars” and often gets called before police do, she said.
