South Carolina Gun Safety Cafés: Strengthening Families for Violence Prevention
By Katie Miller
In South Carolina (as in the U.S.), guns are now the leading cause of death among children and adolescents, surpassing car crashes and cancer. South Carolina ranks 9th in gun death rates in the country. With the help of Be Strong Families, the South Carolina Department of Public Health (DPH) is taking action to turn the tide.
Participants in the Healthy Lives: Put Down the Guns Workshop.
South Carolina Takes Action
With funding from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the South Carolina DPH (which at the time was the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control) offered a competitive bid for evidence-based programs to reduce gun violence. Be Strong Families was awarded one of five contracts and is joining forces with the DPH to address some of the communities most burdened by gun violence.
The (CDC) released a comprehensive technical package in 2016 for preventing youth violence. It emphasizes the importance of promoting healthy family relationships. The CDC states that nurturing, supportive family environments significantly lower the risk of community violence and its negative consequences.
Parent Café core principles align directly with the CDC recommendations. Cafés are proven to build the knowledge and skills to increase the quality of interactions among parents and children.
Be Strong Families Response
The peer-based, focused conversations that Cafés provide can be applied with great success to a variety of social challenges. A team from Be Strong Families got to work adapting the Café model to address gun safety and nonviolence.
Tecoria Jones is a Be Strong Families board member and long-time advocate for families. Amani Rodriguez, BSW is a Café trainer and a member of the National Parent Café Leadership Team. Both are South Carolina natives. These two mothers, along with select Be Strong Families staff, a diverse group of local parents, gun owners, and individuals impacted by gun violence, collaborated to create Café discussion questions around gun safety and nonviolence.
The Gun Safety Cafés specifically support the goals of the DPH initiative in South Carolina. Cafés mobilize parents to play a key role in protecting and educating their children on safety and violence.
Cafés address the core issues of reducing:
Gun carrying among adolescents
The rate of minors and young adults committing violent crimes
Firearm-related deals
Nonfatal physical assaults
Nonfatal firearm injury and
Homicide.
Two-Generation, Two-Tiered Support
Be Strong Families provides two key components to reduce and prevent community violence: education and parent support. Parents are invited to attend the Healthy Living: Put Down the Guns training, a series of Gun Safety Parent Cafés, or both. Parents can access the programs separately, yet they work symbiotically to reach both youth and adults.
By providing gun safety education for youth and creating spaces for parents to learn nonviolent parenting strategies, Be Strong Families takes a two-generation, holistic approach to tackling gun violence. Youth and parents or their trusted adults learn together.
Learning Gun Responsibility
The Healthy Living: Put Down the Guns program educates youth on gun violence and prevention with candid, transformative conversations about safety and accountability. Youth who have been adjudicated or fascinated with guns attend classes with their parent or trusted adult.
Jeff Grimes and Dayo Banks co-facilitate the powerful Healthy Living curriculum. Sessions feature powerful guest speakers, including a mother and daughter who lost a son and brother to gun violence. Members of law enforcement, former gang members, and local hospital staff share their first-hand experience of gun violence in detail.
But none of these guests shake fingers at or tell the youth what to do. The goal is to help young people explore all levels of impact of gun violence – individual and family, short- and long-term, emotional, financial, and spiritual – and help them make wise decisions about gun usage.
Gun Safety Parent Cafés
Adults are offered the opportunity to attend a series of three Gun Safety Parent Cafés centered around safety and nonviolent parenting. Like all Parent Cafés, the group culture is created with intentionality, a nonjudgmental and nurturing space to reflect, grieve, and create strategies for protecting their loved ones.
The first week’s Café series theme is “Keeping Your Child Safe.” Week two is “Knowing your Home is Safe,” and week three is “Raising Safe Children.” This open yet focused approach allows parents and trusted adults a chance to explore ways to keep their homes and their loved ones safe from gun violence. Parents grieve and celebrate together. They gain strength from one another. They leave with actionable steps and a newfound sense of solidarity.
Building Strong Local Partnerships
Darlington County First Steps partners with Be Strong Families to connect parents in rural Darlington County to the gun safety program. Their focus is on parents involved in early childhood programs, including young parents, with an emphasis on reducing violence in the home. In 2024, seventeen parents and/or concerned community members participated in the Café series and Healthy Living initiative.
One Café cohort participant was a mother who lost her child just a year earlier due to gun violence. She was grieving and angry. The Gun Safety Cafés provided her an outlet to share her experience and process her pain. For the second cohort of Cafés, she trained as a Café table host and made decorations for their group. From what she gained as a participant, she was compelled to create this same safe, nurturing space for others.
Gun Safety Cafés will expand in 2025 to Richland County. Here, the Richland County Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA) volunteers and South Carolina Department of Juvenile Justice (SCDJJ) will refer families involved in the child welfare system and youth adjudicated for weapon offenses or at risk for gun violence.
The City of Columbia in Richland County is seeing the value of community conversation and more proactively aligning with prevention efforts. This initiative is evidence that a community's best support is the community itself.
In both locations, the goals are clear. We define success with specific, quantifiable outcomes, including:
· Increased knowledge of conflict resolution
· Attitudinal shifts toward non-violence
· Reduction in peer influence and
· Changes in behavior related to gun storage and family communication.
A Safer Future
Parents play an integral role in addressing social challenges, including community violence. This initiative is creating safer homes and stronger communities by focusing on education, peer support, and a two-generation approach to gun safety.
Let’s reduce community violence in your area together. Get in touch with us about offering Gun Safety Parent Cafés to the families you serve.