Growing up in North Omaha and
seeing my family members go in and out of jail,
that encouraged me to
want to be something different,
want to do something different.
Having great mentors,
men that look like myself showing me the way,
really just changed a whole young man’s life.
My name is Willie Barney,
CEO and founder of the Empowerment Network.
We facilitate My Brother's Keeper here in Omaha.
Omaha,
it's grown pretty tremendously over the last ten years.
And as we got to begin to do work here in the city
with our boys and young men of color,
we saw some of the barriers.
The graduation rate at the time that we started
was 50 percent for our young men.
We were looking at all time highs
in gun violence, especially youth violence.
And what we looked to do was
to go directly to those young men
and learn from them,
what would it take for them to be
successful in the city of Omaha?
Welcome to the Omaha 360 weekly
collaborative partner meeting.
We host meetings consistently
with leaders in the community,
youth and families,
the police department,
people that have been involved in gang intervention,
sitting at the same table and talking about
what are the issues?
Then also what are some of the solutions?
What we found over the years is
those most impacted by violence,
they have the ideas, the strategies
because they're closest to it.
The Omaha that I know,
you couldn't get this many people
in the same room together.
Now that we have that,
most of my partnerships in the last three years
have come from in this room.
The things that I hear at these meetings,
the people that I'm able to meet,
I never thought I would have met them
had I not been in this room.
Good afternoon.
I'm the captain of the Northwest precinct.
I only have one incident and one follow up.
We look at the prior seven days.
What are the activities that have occurred
specifically related to gun violence,
what are the things that we can respond to,
what’s coming up the next seven days
that we can make sure that we get in front of
to make sure that we're all aligned.
It's a great forum for connection
to our law enforcement,
so that there can be really open and honest dialog
that helps the community to really understand their
role and responsibility in preventing violence,
but then also kind of helps our law enforcement
to understand the heart of the community
with their response to violence.
So our law enforcement agencies are seeing
people and not just problems.
We have learned from our young men
looking to stay out of the gang life,
they wanted employment.
They wanted to be productive
and see what's possible in their own city.
So MBK connects young men with career exploration,
internships, entrepreneurship.
It helps them understand how important education is
by providing an opportunity for them
to actually experience it.
Exposure to employment opportunities
that I probably normally wouldn't have had was huge.
I started getting my grades up.
I learned leadership,
I started impacting other people's lives, too.
There has been a measurable impact.
The graduation rate has increased from 50 percent
up to a high of 81 percent
for our African-American young men.
We had a 21 percent unemployment rate.
We were able to get that down to 7 percent.
When it comes to non-fatal gun assaults,
we've seen a reduction from a high of 243
down to a low of 90 at one point.
Homicides were reduced from 43 to 30.
When we started this process,
the clearance rate as far as homicides that did occur
being solved
was at the rate of 32 percent.
Over the years,
working more collectively
as a community with the police department,
it hit as high as 90 percent.
That's one of the highest in the nation,
especially for a city of this size.
To see the impact of violence just reduce,
it gives our youth a different outlook on life.
This doesn't have to be your fate.
You don't have to pick up a gun,
you don't have to retaliate.
Let's get you more involved
in mentoring opportunities, in service learning.
Let us show you how you can make a change.
This stuff is all coming full circle
and we all have a different understanding
now of what it's going to take.
That’s why I'm more confident than I've ever been
that we are going to solve this.
For me, living in a safe community
means having kids be able to just
go outside and enjoy being children
without having to worry about
violence, or gun threats, or gangs.
I feel like we need safer communities everywhere,
not just in Omaha.
Cities across the country have been calling,
wanting to know more about Omaha 360
and our partnership with MBK.
So we've been able to now do work
in those other cities,
and I think this partnership with MBK
will just accelerate that.
It's been an incredible partnership,
and greatly looking forward
to where it goes from here.