On an unusually warm October evening, a team of researchers from Northwestern University huddled in the meeting room in an old West Side storefront that serves as headquarters for the Institute for Nonviolence Chicago. Around the table sits an unlikely assembly: academic researchers pecking away at laptops and street outreach workers with decades of experience checking phones for neighborhood alerts. We’re gathered to examine science-y looking spiderweb diagrams—social network maps of recent shooting victims from the area. Each dot on these screens represents someone the outreach workers know intimately: their family histories, their beefs, their daily struggles.
The team is here to go through the SOAR process—Street Outreach Analytic Response—something developed through deep partnership between academics bringing cutting-edge network science and outreach teams contributing their lived experiences and neighborhood knowledge. SOAR emerged from a recognition that these worlds too often talk past each other. Analytics divorced from lived experiences and neighborhood realities can feel punishing and abusive to communities already over-surveilled by the state. Outreach workers and those involved in gun violence often distrust data and its uses, especially when wielded by law enforcement against them.
On the other hand, outreach workers know every nook and cranny of their neighborhoods, everyone’s cousin, every crew’s territory, every simmering beef. But their capacity, however extensive, has limits. When violence spreads beyond their immediate networks, they might face a steep knowledge cliff. That missing link—a connection they can’t see, a pathway they don’t know—might be exactly what’s needed to save a life.
SOAR was developed to bridge this divide to, in a sense, provide a social GPS to help outreach and amplify their efforts. To build something that people trust, driven by and for outreach workers, but enhanced by data analytics. It’s not about replacing street knowledge with algorithms, but about amplifying local expertise with scientific pattern recognition. In these weekly meetings, outreach workers maintain their “license to operate” while gaining new tools to see beyond their immediate networks.
“Look here,” says Sam, an outreach supervisor at the Institute for Nonviolence, pointing to a cluster of connections on the screen. “We’ve been trying to reach this kid for weeks, but see how he’s connected through his cousin in Garfield Park? That changes our whole approach.”
The room nods in recognition of something powerful happening: not just researchers sharing data or practitioners sharing street knowledge, but a third space emerging from their intersection. This is innovation in real time, not coming from the academy or the streets alone, but from the solidarity created between them.
This is what solidarity looks like in practice—not just alignment of goals, but the patient work of building shared understanding across different ways of knowing.
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We both work in an awkward fertile third space that is between and comprised of academic research and community practice. Separately and together, we’ve sat in sterile university conference rooms where gun violence gets discussed with clinical distance and in community centers where the same topic, weighted with personal grief and pain, can make statistics seem absurd. We’ve analyzed network data showing how violence spreads through social ties, and we’ve sat with outreach workers who can name every person in those networks, complete with family histories and recent beefs.
What we’ve learned through the SOAR process is that innovation happens at this intersection: where rigorous analysis meets neighborhood knowledge, where academic credentials meet street credibility, where theory meets practice. But generating and sustaining this third space requires not just line staff and scientific expertise but the often unsexy and underappreciated layer of management that drives—and spurs—innovation between them.
This middle management piece—the directors, coordinators, and translators who move between spaces—is what’s often missing from stories about solidarity. These are the people who can sit in a university conference room discussing regression analyses in the morning and walk violent blocks mediating conflicts in the afternoon. Some have college degrees, others have street credentials and decades of lived experience with trauma, but all share the ability to translate across different forms of expertise.
Solidarity isn’t just mutual respect—it’s recognizing that innovation and action happen in this translation layer, where different ways of knowing collide and create something new.
When solidarity fractures—when we stand apart from each other—we all lose, the work stagnates, the cracks appear, and the knives come out to carve up the field. But, more importantly, innovation stops. Practitioners miss the broader patterns that might inform their strategies. Researchers miss the crucial context that explains why programs succeed or fail in specific neighborhoods. And without that management layer to translate between them, both groups talk past each other while the political window for supporting these programs narrows.
Both of us have seen this play out repeatedly in debates about community violence intervention (CVI). Academic critics point to mixed statistical results as evidence that these programs don’t work. Community organizations counter that the metrics themselves miss what matters. Meanwhile, the people who could bridge these perspectives—who understand both the power of data and the reality of streets—rarely get heard in policy debates.
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When the team at Northwestern first approached us about collaborating on the SOAR process, I knew we’d face several obstacles.
In the CVI field, outreach workers have long been wary of academics and researchers. There is a perception, built through years of experience, that the research community views street outreach workers as mules—a means to an end—without truly appreciating our unique knowledges and expertise.
There was also the reality that lists and data analysis were tools of law enforcement and possibly vulnerable to subpoenas. That meant a field that sees itself as intervening in times of crisis could not emulate the medical field, which gathers personal, family, and community data to improve treatments, and focus interventions. So, we kept most information in our heads.
Despite these fears, I realized that we had spent thirty years not fully benefitting from data. While we had access to information that would allow us to predict gun violence—a good neighborhood outreach worker could tell a mother, for example, whether her son was in danger of being shot in the next ninety days—we couldn’t act on these predictions for fear that law enforcement would subpoena our data. This was holding the field back.
The team from Northwestern offered us the potential to overcome these barriers by mapping the social networks connected to our lists. And once our teams began to work side by side and spend time together day after day, relationships developed. Barriers dropped and friendships formed through an investment of time. It was not transactional. There were no shortcuts.
We gave feedback, they absorbed it, they worked with us—even when it wasn’t easy. And that’s solidarity.
Once we implemented SOAR, I visited Chicago CRED, another violence reduction partner, to observe the way they were using the technology, and I was surprised to see that they were applying it in a very different way than we were. While we were focused on the victims, they were looking at entire social clusters around participants so they could increase enrollment from underserved groups.
This observation led to a realization: if we could fill in those gaps around existing participants, we would get a much better picture. It would enable us to say: “That high risk individual is related to another participant or an outreach worker. He’s in that network. Let’s talk to him.”
After that visit we began mapping the networks of participants as well as victims. For example, we can now see that Jack was arrested before on a gunshot charge with Joe, and Mike must be their friend. This allows my team to identify the network in a full way so that they can begin outreach and interrupt the potential violence.
Homicide anniversaries are another example of how greater collaboration and data has helped paint a clearer picture for our outreach workers. We used to think that retaliation for homicides happened within weeks, but Northwestern’s data showed us that retaliation happened way past that point and often on the anniversary of the homicide. Now, we track anniversaries to help us predict gun violence. In addition, we manage teams, not only to focus on the most recent emergency, but to assess conflicts in the long term and to continue “maintenance” work since retaliations can occur much later.
Since we began working with the SOAR team to strengthen connections with victims and community members, the program has become a crucial tool in our work. SOAR has helped identify the types of conflicts taking place, supported efforts to connect with victims and their families, and facilitated safer engagement with individuals who may otherwise have been difficult to reach. It has also provided critical opportunities for collaboration with other violence prevention partners, ensuring that interventions are more coordinated and responsive to community needs.
In several cases, SOAR has been instrumental in mediating and deescalating potentially retaliatory situations, creating safer outcomes for those directly impacted by violence as well as the broader community.
Beyond individual incidents, SOAR has contributed to building a deeper knowledge base for our outreach and advocacy. The system holds deidentified records of the community members we have been able to reach, offering valuable insight into patterns of conflict and intervention. By making it easier to track and prioritize cases, we can respond to urgent situations while also creating a safer and more sustainable process for addressing ongoing conflicts.
As we continue to get more sophisticated in the analysis of data, there is still a long way to go. The field of CVI still lags when making decisions based on that data. We tend to rely on anecdotes rather than on the data, which is often untimely. Yet even as a work in progress, the innovations forged in this third space comprised of researchers and street outreach workers over the last thirty years are undoubtedly saving lives.
True solidarity requires more than mutual respect. It demands new ways of working together.
In our research partnerships, this has meant fundamentally changing how we collect and interpret data. Our field researchers aren’t just external observers, they’re community partners themselves, bringing both methodological training and neighborhood knowledge. The questions we ask are shaped by outreach workers’ insights about what matters on the ground. And our findings go through multiple rounds of interpretation with practitioners before we finalize reports.
For CVI organizations, solidarity has meant creating space for research questions that might not yield immediately useful answers, trusting the process of inquiry even when it doesn’t align with immediate program needs. It means documenting work that once remained informal and creating systems that make invisible labor visible.
Also, CVI is a powerful client that requests research and data to assess its methods and impact. A collaboration among equals creates better problem solving and innovation. It is no longer a passive field, evaluated by outsiders, on behalf of powerful players who lack a full buy-in or appetite for complex learning.
Today, CVI stands at a crossroads. The field faces both promising possibilities and existential threats. Federal funding is dwindling under the Trump administration. Academic debates about evaluation continue to privilege certain kinds of evidence over others. And the infrastructure built during COVID’s violence spike remains fragile.
In this moment, solidarity between researchers and practitioners becomes even more crucial. Academic voices lend legitimacy when political winds shift. Community knowledge ensures that programs remain responsive to neighborhood needs rather than funder priorities. Together, they create a foundation sturdy enough to weather political cycles.
Back in that Institute for Nonviolence meeting room, as our SOAR session winds down, Sam pulls up his phone to coordinate with other CVI organizations about what we’ve learned. “This little clique pattern we’re seeing,” he says, “this is someone from the South Side. That’s not our area, but I’m gonna reach out to an outreach worker over there right now—they gotta know these guys.” It’s a small moment of discovery, one of thousands that happen across Chicago when people with the ability to translate between research and practice create something neither could achieve alone.
These moments don’t make headlines or policy briefs, but they’re building something lasting: a shared understanding of safety that draws on multiple forms of expertise. In these solidarities—and in the management layer that makes them possible—lies our best hope for reducing violence. Not in any single approach, but in the spaces we create between them, where academic rigor meets street wisdom, where data meets stories, where research meets reality.
Reprinted with permission from The Notebook, Volume 2, a publication from The Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School blending academic insight, lived experience, and artistic expression. Dedicated to “solidarities,” Volume 2 includes stories and research that illuminate the power of collective efforts to foster unity and justice. This volume serves as an intellectual resource and emotional anchor, inspiring healing amidst division. Access the free, digital version of The Notebook, Volume 2 here.
Starting on February 26, The Justice Collaboratory will host a series of free webinars inspired by The Notebook, Volume 2. To learn more and to register, click here.
Art: Hector Rodriguez
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