Community Safety Working Session: Addressing Gun Violence with Atlanta Prevention Advocates

The Session

This wasn't a demo we were showing off — it was, in Ben's words to the room, "not really a presentation," because everything past the introduction was a preview and a work in progress. The Annie E. Casey Foundation-funded gun violence work was new territory for HET, so before building it out further, we brought it — reports and all — to the people who work in community safety, violence interruption, and trauma response every day, and asked them to break it.

Setting the Table

Ben opened with HET's origin story — built in 2020 in response to COVID-19 exposing how unevenly marginalized communities were being tracked and served — before Eric walked the group through the new gun violence reports: Gun Homicides and Suicides, a Youth report, and a Black Men report, each followed by live Q&A. The feedback here was specific and practical: attendees wanted zip-code-level breakdowns instead of county-level only, asked whether previous hospitalization for violent injury should factor into the data (one attendee, co-chair of a city violence fatality review board, noted many people killed by firearms had been hospitalized for a violent injury within the same year), and pointed out structural gaps like the lack of Level One trauma centers in the highest-violence neighborhoods of cities including Chicago and DC — a factor that affects survival independent of the violence rate itself.

My Piece: Designing the Policy Hub

The second half of the session was mine: a live walkthrough of a Policy Hub prototype I'd designed and built — the first time anyone outside our team of three had seen it. Where the data reports serve researchers and policymakers, I built the Policy Hub for the general public: anyone trying to understand gun violence as the public health crisis Dr. Satcher describes it as, without needing to already know how to read a choropleth map. I opened by polling the room on their own role in community safety work, then walked through four sections in order — Crisis Overview, Addressing Inequities, Current Efforts, and Reform Opportunities — stopping after each one for live feedback through an embedded Q&A tool.

What Advocates Told Me

The feedback reshaped real decisions, not just wording:

• A violence-prevention program leader pushed for zip-code-level detail specifically, tied to the neighborhoods her organization already serves — direct input into where we take the Policy Hub's geographic granularity next.
• Multiple attendees flagged that "legal intervention" is defined differently across organizations, which led me to commit to adding a comparison of definitions rather than presenting one as the standard.
• A public health researcher pointed out that "gun violence is a public health problem" needed an actual definition behind it in the Crisis Overview, not just the framing quote — the section reads as settled to people already in the field, but not to a general reader.
• Structural context was missing: attendees wanted the Current Efforts section to connect dots I hadn't drawn yet, like how something as indirect as Medicaid expansion affects violence outcomes.
• Drawing a direct parallel to HET's HIV blog, one researcher suggested the Policy Hub could carry the same kind of first-person community storytelling — and specifically that anonymous submissions should be an option for people not ready to attach their name to their story.
  I also heard the throughline for what comes next: cross-linking the Policy Hub and the heavy data pages both ways, so someone reading about DeKalb or Fulton County's data lands on the policy history behind it, and vice versa.

What's Next

The team's next phase, still under the Annie E. Casey Foundation grant, includes adding maternal mortality data, expanding demographic breakdowns like income level, and running user interviews with attendees who volunteered. We also opened the blog to community contributors directly — including an anonymous-submission option, confirmed with communications, for anyone with a story about gun violence who isn't ready to put their name on it.