Champions for Peace: A Conversation with Aaron Rivas of New Life Centers
Community violence intervention relies on concerned individuals willing to serve as peacemakers within their communities. They work tirelessly to prevent violence by engaging those at highest risk of using or being injured by a gun to alter the trajectory of their lives and curb the spread of violence. In this series, we hope to highlight the invaluable contributions of CVI workers and foster a deeper understanding of CVI from the perspective of the frontlines.
This quarter, our Champion for Peace is Aaron Rivas, a street outreach coordinator with New Life Centers of Chicagoland, where he serves the Little Village and Brighton Park neighborhoods. New Life is a faith-based organization that provides street outreach, mentoring, restorative justice programming for youth, and more, in Chicago and the surrounding area.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Street Outreach Coordinator for New Life Centers of Chicagoland| Chicago, Illinois
GIFFORDS CENTER FOR VIOLENCE INTERVENTION: What does community violence intervention mean to you?
AARON RIVAS: When I first started doing this work, it was all about saving lives, but we don’t always know what’s going to happen or how it’s going to happen. You’re never on solid ground in these communities. Many have a 50-to-60-year history of problems with gun violence—of young people losing their lives to the streets. But we’re not just losing them to the streets. We’re losing them to the system as well. There’s poverty, drug abuse, trauma, and a lack of resources.
One of the first mentees that I ever worked with asked me to drop him off one night in this area of Chicago that was a hotspot for violence. It was 12:30 at night, and I said, “Man, if I drop you off right here at this time, I’m doing you a disservice. Let me take you home.” It was a hard conversation I had with him, but, he decided to go home. Two hours after I dropped him off, he passed away in his house in a fire.
Because of the way these individuals are living life, and what can happen at any time, I take it day by day and address every need. I wake up and go to court, take someone to their job, or a mentoring session. I try to meet every need every day because I don’t know when I’m going to have them or see them again.
What brought you to this work, and how do you keep yourself motivated?
I was a kindergarten teacher when I was introduced to street outreach. After church service one day, a guy invited me to a funeral. He said he had a death in the family, told us about the services—when and where—and asked if we could come to support them.
A lot of people talk about mothers losing their kids—which is obviously important to highlight— but this hit different. This time, I saw it from a father’s point of view. I have had to hear the cries of a mother, but the howls of a dad are what changed me.
The way he was crying—it was like every time he cried, it was hitting me deeper and deeper in my soul. When I walked up to the casket, I noticed the kid’s name. His name was Aaron. It kind of threw me back.
Whoever did that to Aaron didn’t know him. Somebody took his life that didn’t even know him. Somebody that was hurt, was looking for somebody to hurt.
When I got home that night I just wasn’t the same. That’s when I got into street outreach work.
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I started driving around Little Village and would see the young men and women outside. I would get out of my car and just offer prayer, “Hey, man, can I pray for you?” I would go to the streets, jails, hospitals, and just be there for people.
I did that for maybe six months to a year until I got word that they were looking for a sports mentor at New Life. The job description was go into the neighborhood hotspots, engage with the high-risk individuals, hospital responses, court advocacy. It was funny to me because I was already doing all this stuff on my own.
It was a really tough decision to leave the safety of a classroom setting with kids and children and put myself on the streets, but eight years later, here I am.
It’s the small victories that keep me going. It’s helping some guys get their GEDs and get jobs, watching these young men having children, and seeing them evolve and grow. Doing good in a neighborhood where the narrative is negative—it’s contagious. People see you doing good and want to be a part of it.
I’ve seen the transition in young men and the older generations. They’re saying, “I want to do what Aaron and his team do. I want to be able to make a difference.”
We have a peacekeeper initiative that offers stipends to guys who are two-feet-in and have influence in their street organizations, and we’re seeing something in them. They’re natural-born leaders who are interested in the work and want to help, but they’re too deep in the weeds to be on the professional side of things right now.
What we do is ask them to be peacekeepers. If they’re in the neighborhood and see one of their guys intoxicated with a gun, they make sure he gets home, make sure he doesn’t hurt somebody. Take care of each other for real.
We have about 60 to 68 peacekeepers, and out of those we were able to hire about 10 on staff.
We are building up the future right now.
Aaron and peacekeepers from the New Life Centers praying. In his street outreach work, Aaron often quotes Matthew 5:9, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.”
What do people need to understand about CVI or addressing violence?
You have to be careful of how you deal with hurt people. We’re at a point where—as people who do street outreach in the South Side of Chicago—when we hear about a 15-year-old shot in the leg, that’s a relief because we’ve seen so many people pass away. At least we know we’re going to be able to see this kid again.
It’s unfortunate that we’re having to settle for that because that kid is still going to go through life traumatized. There’s also the kids who hear the gunshots. It’s the mothers. It’s the brothers.
Many young men carry guns, not because they want to hurt somebody but because in their mind, that’s their way of feeling safe. To detach that trauma from an individual can take a long time.
If you’re not familiar with a certain community or know the history behind it, you don’t really know why people are the way they are. It’s sometimes generational. Dads, sons, uncles, cousins—they’re all out there, and it’s normal to them. That’s a hard narrative to change.
To do this type of work, you really have to have a passion for it and a strong, compassionate heart. You have to see past everything, regardless of who they are or how they look, and say, “I love you, man.” Those moments are important, where we kind of make it awkward like, “Okay, I love you, man. Be safe!”
We show them the love, and they say it back, “I love you, Aaron.” They’ll even tell me, “Bro, be safe.”
Thank you so much for speaking with us today, Aaron. Is there anything else you’d like to add?
Yes, I want to give a special shout out to my colleagues, Jorge Roque and Benny Estrada, my mentors and brothers. They are paving the way for people like me to get involved in this work.
Thank you, Aaron Rivas and the entire New Life Centers team. We look forward to bringing you more conversations with other dedicated peacemakers.
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