Hundreds of families and community members gathered in the Dorchester Town Field Park in an 29-year-old annual Mother’s Day tradition to support those impacted by homicide and trauma.
“In 1996 Clementina Chery, our founder, it had been just over two years since her son was murdered, and she wanted to do something for Mother’s Day,” said Luis Antonio Thompson, senior producer at the Louis D. Brown Peace Institute. “How does a mother who has lost a child to murder celebrate a day like that, especially when she still has children?
“And so her idea was to just walk around the neighborhood,” he continued. “To walk around the Dorchester community, where he lived, and also where he was murdered, as a way of her saying, I will not stay silent on Mother’s Day.”
The annual Walk for Peace is the Peace Institute’s flagship fundraiser and aimed to raise $600,000 for “critical services, advocacy, and training for survivors of homicide victims and communities impacted by murder, trauma, grief, and loss.”
As of Sunday, Thompson said, they’d tallied over $500,000 and the campaign will remain open for donations through Father’s Day in June.
The Peace Institute runs services including the Survivors Outreach Services program, assisting families and survivors of homicide victims in the first 24 to 72 hours after homicide; the Generation Peace program, working with youth on projects like art installations; and the Community Reentry
Services program, assisting people coming out of prison.
“We look at, what our founder and CEO says, assisting people on both sides of the gun,” said Thompson. “There are never any winners, anytime any act of violence happens, that families and people who are left behind are the ones who are ultimately impacted. When we’re able to assist families, and when we’re able to assist people who are coming out of prison, and also assist their families, we’re looking at, ‘how do we cultivate cycles of peace?’”
The walk this year was themed “Cultivating Cycles of Peace,” and kicked off at 7 a.m. Participants started walking in the park at 9 a.m., and the event closed with a rally at 10:30 a.m.
The temperature was warm and sunny through Sunday morning, and the event felt “celebratory” and “joyous,” Thompson said. With the “political climate right now, there’s a lot of people who are feeling pessimistic and scared,” he added, but the gathering showed “people can and will and still do come together in the name of a greater cause.”
“Mourning, loss is certainly a part of it, especially when so many have have lost children to violence,” said Thompson. “But then there’s also the element of celebrating their lives, celebrating in their honor. And certainly I fee the joy, the spirit of love, the spirit of unity, the spirit of hope, all of that was present today.”
