Fighting Violence with Love

By Patrick Evans

He wants his peers to shine brighter than bling.

Bling indicates money and status, and Kofi Hope, the 21-year-old founder of the Black Youth Coalition Against Violence, says its radiance has blinded black youth to the core values of family and community.

He sees links between bling, lost values and the rash of gun murders that has traumatized Toronto.

“Within youth culture, especially black youth, there’s a real focus on materialism and consumerism,” says Hope, a University of Toronto political science student and president of the school’s Black Students’ Association. “Kids are seeing that their ability to have bling, to be shining, is their value in the world.

“How they flaunt their money is the value people have here.”

With young black men being killed with alarming frequency in Toronto this year, Hope decided that groups reaching out to black youth in the city had to join forces to maximize their effectiveness.

In September, he pulled together various groups from across Toronto, including black student groups, to form the youth anti-violence coalition.

In addition to tutoring and mentorship programs, the coalition’s member groups are planning a summit this month to get black youth directly involved in the development of their communities — and to earn a seat at the table when police and all levels of government make decisions on how to tackle gun problems in the places where they live.

Hope gave the newborn coalition its mantra, too, a recasting of the word “bling” as an acronym for “bring love in, not guns.” This led to the group’s BLING bracelet campaign, which is raising funds for the summit through sales of grey silicone bracelets at $2 each.

Members of the Erin Mills United Church met Hope as a little boy at Sunday services and watched him grow into a leadership role in their summer youth programs.

Even as a kid, he was intellectually intense beyond his years, says Kathy Toivanen, the church’s minister. But she says he’s got charm, too. These qualities — as good a recipe for charisma as any — have turned out a young man everybody likes and everybody wants to hear.

“I think he’s got substantial potential,” Toivanen says. “He’s been grounded well in a community — not just a black community — but a faith community.

“He’s got a sense of justice that’s rooted in something substantial, that can strengthen him.”

Hope says he looks to previous generations of his own family for inspiration and alternatives to the consumerism and violence he sees around him.

His father, he says, “has rural Canadian values which aren’t consumerist …. My dad used to talk about how they had pop one night a week and that was the biggest treat.”

Hope also remembers the tiles his grandfather had in his house.

“When he moved, he pulled the tiles off and took them with him.”

The old man didn’t even particularly like the tiles, but he valued them nonetheless.

Hope isn’t saying thrift is a cure-all for rampant consumerism or violence.

But in those rural Canadian values, so far removed from the glare of bling and the noise of guns, families and communities are watching out for each other, and thriving.

That’s what he wants for Toronto’s black youth in 2006.