They're saving a city, one child at a time

Genevor Monell founded Mothers With Courage, a group for mothers who have lost children to jail or murder. (Globe Staff Photo / Justine Hunt)

Even after the five teenagers who promised to attend did not show up for a new after-school program she launched last week, Genevor Monell kept her hope alive.

"You see that church van outside," she said last Monday as she waited at a Pentecostal church in Hyde Park. "I'll have to just use it and pick them up, because children are sneaky. . . . I'm determined to keep them out of [the Department of Youth Services] and the big man's jail."

Monell is founder of a new grass-roots support group called Mothers With Courage, an alliance of ordinary women who meet to share their pain over the children they have lost to prison and murder. Recently, the group launched an after-school program to steer at- risk teens out of trouble through art projects, leadership skills training, one-on-one support, and a host of other activities.

The group is working against troubling statistics.

In Boston, the number of shooting victims 17 years and younger, fatal and nonfatal, nearly tripled over the last five years, from 23 in 2002 to 67 in 2007, the Globe reported last month. This year, through Sept. 14, 53 victims have been 17 years and younger, police data show.

At DYS, figures show 353 youths were waiting for trials last month, 36 more than in September of last year. Fifty-nine youths who had completed trials were placed in DYS custody last month for a range of offenses, including violent crimes. That's 13 more than a year ago.

Monell knows what it feels like to watch a child slip out of control. Her own son Ernesto has been in and out of prison since he was 18, the longest stretch - nine years - for attempted murder.

Ernesto had a decent home, a father who was at home, siblings who cared, and a mother working three jobs to feed the family, Monell said.

By the time Monell figured out Ernesto was getting into trouble, it was too late to save him. She'd read about his arrest in the newspaper.

"That couldn't be my son," said Monell, 50, in her Dorchester apartment recently. "That's all I said to myself. I said 'Where did I go wrong here?' He had everything. He didn't need to be on the streets. What went wrong?"

Hoping to turn feelings of powerlessness into strength, Monell established Mothers With Courage last year. The group has 15 mothers from across the city and nearby whose children have been incarcerated, she said. One mother has a child who was killed and three others in prison, Monell said.

There is no money. The group meets periodically in the basement of a church. And it has survived on the will and strength of the participants, whose mission - based on their own struggles - is to keep other teens alive and out of prison.

"If we want to win this battle, we are going to need a force, and that force is us," Monell, who is from St. Croix, told the group one recent Saturday evening. "Healing is never forgetting what we've been through, but that we can move on to help another family."

Monell, also a cofounder of a similar program at the Louis D. Brown Peace Institute in Dorchester, and other champions of inner-city peace, say that when it comes to grieving the loss of a child, either to death or to the penal system, there isn't a big difference.

"On both ends, you are dealing with a lot of pain, shame, and anger, and to recognize these things . . . it takes a lot of courage to look at that and move beyond that," said Rachel Fazzino of the Peace Institute.

Monell was more succinct: "Regardless of what [happened], we are still mothers."

Deborah Prothrow-Stith, an adjunct professor at Harvard School of Public Health, said that when focused on prevention, groups such as Mothers With Courage play a key role "in helping family members heal."

"We call it healing through helping," she said.

Monell, who raised five children, is, in a way, a mother for the mothers, turning up at funerals, at marches, court hearings, and trials, or calling on the phone to console and guide women.

She doesn't choose sides.

"I was going through hell," said one woman at the Saturday meeting. "That's when I met Genevor."

Another mother said she didn't want to come out of her house because of the stigma attached to having a son accused of a crime. "I didn't want to go on the bus," she said. "I don't know how I got to work."

In the basement of the First United Pentecostal Church of Boston at the Saturday meeting, Monell and the two mothers gathered to talk. It's what they do twice monthly. They talk into the morning sometimes. Everybody gets her cry. Everybody listens.

Monell reeled off the new business: Four new mothers have joined the group. One's son will be sentenced in December. "Right now, she's not ready," Monell said.

Another's son is in prison, and there's still anger because "he's in the hole," said Monell, referring to solitary confinement.

The after-school program that Mothers With Courage started and that Monell, a former preschool teacher, oversees aims to keep other kids from ending up in the same circumstances. The US Justice Department says juvenile violence peaks in the after-school hours on school days and in the evenings, and it hails efforts that target juveniles during those times.

Monell said five males ages 13 to 18 showed up the first day two weeks ago, but the room at the church was flooded because of heavy rain, so she took them bowling instead.

"We are giving back to the community," Monell said. "We know that our children have destroyed our community, and if we can help a child, this is one way to do it."

As for the ones who did not show up last Monday, Monell plans to get on their cases.

"Eventually they will come," she said. "I don't give up."