Joanne Kenen is Politico’s health care editor.

Ryane Nickens stood in a patch of grass as sleet rained down on one of the most historically troubled neighborhoods of Southeast Washington. It was the first time Nickens had come back to this spot in Washington Highlands since her brother, then 19, had been gunned down in the parking lot 22 years ago. A little boy, on his way to school, had found the body.

The buildings are newly painted, bright, crisp colors. Some had been torn down, to create more open space. There’s a playground nearby, though it’s empty on a cold wet day.


Around the corner we had just walked past, sirens blared and lights flashed as emergency vehicles converged. Another shooting, right near Hendley Elementary School. The kids there had been on lockdown 10 times since October, people in the neighborhood said. This made 11. (Hendley’s principal did not respond to an email request to confirm the frequency of lockdowns. Washington police records show 12 violent crimes including two killings within 1,000 feet of the school so far this year.)

Somebody had been “beefin,” Nickens said, referring to the ongoing disputes that travel from one apartment building in this neighborhood to the next—drug deals, turf wars, perceived slights that elsewhere may have been resolved with words, not with guns.

Nickens, 39, who grew up nearby, left, and returned, is all too familiar with this kind of scene. She lost a brother, a pregnant sister and an uncle to gun violence. Her mother, another sister and others close to her were all shot when a dispute with a neighbor escalated from shouting to shoving to shooting, but they survived.

Violent deaths like these might not make CNN headlines, captivate Twitter or spawn nationwide marches, but they leave scars. “You feel like you’ve been dropped into the ocean, this big ocean of grief, and you are trying to find your way to a peaceful time of your life when they were still there,” Nickens said, describing her struggles to survive it, in a recent speech to a community group.

Now, Nickens has made it her mission to address the pervasive trauma in poor, crime-ridden Washington neighborhoods east of the Anacostia River. Building on an idea she had as a college student in North Carolina, which she developed later as a divinity student at Howard University, Nickens recently started the TraRon Center—named for her late sister and brother, Tracy Hall and Ronald Nickens Jr.—to offer healing and to help prevent the repetitive cycle of violence from stunting another generation. Some people she works with have had friends and family members murdered; others haven’t experienced such direct personal loss but still have trouble getting through each day and each night on streets so riven by violence.

Ryane Nickens, right, confers with Lopa Shah, the resident program director of Atlantic Apartment Homes, about future programming at the Atlantic Gardens Apartments Community Center. | André Chung for Politico Magazine

“When a community has suffered generational violence, its hope becomes fragile or nonexistent,” she told me as we walked away from the parking lot where her brother’s body had lain. “The community can become conditioned to accepting things as they are with no real hope for what could be.”

She wants to restore hope. She wants the TraRon Center to offer peer support groups, counseling and a summer camp. Ultimately, she wants to channel all that sorrow into something far more positive—a community-rooted movement to make neighborhoods safer and get rid of the guns. “I want people affected by gun violence to come and work through their trauma and find a place of healing and find their voice,” she said, sitting on an orange plastic chair in the community room of Atlantic Gardens, a subsidized apartment complex here, a few blocks from where her brother died. The first step is giving people a safe place to talk through today’s pain so they can face tomorrow.



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The country is talking about—and marching about—gun violence with an intensity not seen since Columbine, the Million Mom March, and the effort to tighten gun laws that narrowly failed in Congress in 1999. But the focus now is primarily on massacres in schools, often in affluent neighborhoods. In neighborhoods like this one, there’s another kind of massacre, slow motion and ceaseless.

The kids from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, are well aware of this. They talk about it and tweet about it; at the March for Our Lives last month, they broadened both the message and the messengers, the suburban kids sharing their stage with kids from inner-city Brooklyn, Chicago, Los Angeles, and yes, the poorer and blacker neighborhoods of D.C. Zion Kelly spoke of the murder of his twin brother, Zaire, at 16, victim of a robbery on his way home from school in the nation’s capital. “Just like all of you, I’ve had enough,” Zion told the crowd.

At the March For Our Lives Rally in Washington, D.C., singer Jennifer Hudson performs as survivors of the Parkland shooting and other young speakers affected by gun violence stand onstage. | Cheriss May/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Nickens admires the Parkland kids—a lot. But here in D.C.’s Ward 8, the poorest part of the city, that activism, that animating and empowering cocktail of grief, anger and hope, feels distant.

Shootings, thefts and gang violence—the beefin’—isn’t as intense as it was a couple of years ago, but it’s still a part of everyday life, wearing down survivors and bystanders alike. Homicides in D.C. dropped last year, to 116, mostly in the eastern half of the city. But they’re ticking up; there were 31 murders as of April 6 this year, a 17 percent increase over the same time period of 2017. In March alone, there were at least nine homicides in Ward 8, according to D.C. police.

“You hear it, you duck and you go on,” said Cassandra Matthews, president of the tenant association at Atlantic Terraces, which along with nearby Atlantic Gardens has become a focal point of Nickens’ work. Matthews’ sister survived a shooting; her cousin did not. A few weeks ago, she ran into a young man, in his mid-20s, who had gone to school with her daughter. She’d watched him grow up; they shared a birthday which was coming up. Days later, he was dead.

“It becomes so normal,” said Matthews, who now meets with Nickens privately for an hour most weeks in an apartment common room. She knows that kids and 20-somethings get in fights. But when she was young, they could fight and be friends again a few days later. It’s different now. “You can’t make up once you’ve shot them dead,” she said.

Nickens understands all this. She witnessed violence, she endured grief, depression, rage, risky and self-destructive behavior as a teen and young adult. With help, from family, teachers, mentors and therapists, she got out of the community and went to college at North Carolina Central University. When she came back to D.C., her first instinct was to build a career, not to retrace her steps. She got a federal job, at the Department of Health and Human Services, a good income, with security and benefits.

But she moved back to Southeast D.C. “I could have moved to a different part of the city. But this is home,” she told me. “Ward 8 is where I stay. Where I buy a house. It’s easy to get up and leave. But if all of us get up and leave, our children and our young people don’t have the representation that they can make it out of their circumstances.”

Yet even as she settled and advanced in her career, something kept tugging at her Eventually she enrolled in Divinity School at Howard, still not quite sure where it would take her.

It brought her here. The TraRon Center is just a few months old. It doesn’t yet have an office or physical space of its own; it didn’t even have a website until a few weeks ago. Nickens is still trying to raise money, using goodwill she’s earned in the Washington interfaith community to speak at churches and synagogues. Some of her ideas haven’t borne fruit, at least not yet. When I first heard one of her talks—as it would turn out, a scant month before the shootings in Florida—she envisioned a place for survivors to come together, a blend of peer support and counseling. She had run a group like that for bereaved mothers while at Howard. But so far, with the exception of a few sessions at Anacostia Library, which are resuming this spring, the peer sessions haven’t caught on, not at Atlantic Gardens.

“There’s just not enough trust,” she said.

Top: On March 20, investigators from the Metropolitan Police Department search for evidence at the scene of a shooting in Washington, D.C. Bottom left: Derrick Langley is the Tenant Association President at Atlantic Gardens Apartments. Ryane Nickens works with him to help deal with the trauma he has experienced while living in the community for the past nine years. Bottom right: Ryane Nickens listens to Derrick Brown, a maintenance technician for Winn Company, which owns Atlantic Gardens Apartments. While at work in February, Brown witnessed a drive-by shooting. | André Chung for Politico Magazine

Yet she’s found champions in the community. Lopa Shah, the resident program director at the Atlantic Gardens apartments, heard about Nickens through another community group earlier this year. She invited her in, gave her space to hold sessions and began encouraging people in the building and in neighboring apartments to come meet with her. “I had been looking for someone like her,” Shah said. “And she appeared.”

By summer, Nickens wants to open a summer camp at Atlantic Gardens, and weave in activities that give children tools to heal and cope—art therapy, journaling, meditation. She’d like to keep it going as an after-school program for kids who attend places like Hendley Elementary, where even a police officer stationed right outside hasn’t deterred the nearby violence. She knows that violence and abuse in childhood increase the likelihood of violence and abuse in adulthood. She wants to break the cycle.

In the meantime, she’s meeting people like Matthews one on one. Some people who seek her out need more therapeutic intervention than her pastoral counseling skills can meet; many are distrustful of therapy, having had bad experiences, but they’ll usually take a referral to the therapists Nickens trusts, who will treat them pro bono.

The president of Atlantic Gardens’ tenant association—Matthews’ counterpart in the second apartment complex—Derrick Langley, also seeks out Nickens for guidance and support. After living in the building for nine years, he doesn’t want to leave his home. He does want it to change, though there are days he has trouble believing it can.

Too many tenants are too afraid to take on those that spread the violence, or too inured to it themselves to make the effort. He’s helped set up domestic violence programs for the residents, only to see abused women cling to their abusers. He knows what that does to them and their children; it’s what some of the young men doing the shooting outside were raised on.

Ryane Nickens listens to a client during a counseling session at Atlantic Gardens Apartments. | André Chung for Politico Magazine

Amid such a grim reality, some of Nickens conversations unfold in the language of faith, about finding God and meaning in a time and place of despair.

“The people here—they don’t know what hope means,” Derrick Brown, a maintenance man who encountered a drive-by shooting a few months ago, told Nickens in one of their regular conversations. “I don’t think they even use that word—I don’t think hope is spoken into their life.”

He has considered returning home to Atlanta; he grapples with his decision to stay, wondering aloud whether he wants to make his home in a community where an armed drug dealer has more status than an honest working man, where when kids start to fight, no adult tells them to stop. Nickens suggests that maybe he has a purpose here, and offers to connect him to community groups that need men like him to mentor boys. He’s intrigued but unsure, wondering whether God will show him what to do.

Nickens, though, has already found her calling. The despair is what drew here here—and the opportunity to build something better.

She remembers the vision of Biblical prophet Ezekiel who hears the voice of God promising to restore life in the Valley of Dry Bones.

“I was dry bones and someone breathed hope and encouragement into me,” Nickens said. “I’m going to breathe it into others. This is the breath that God has called me to breathe and I will breathe it.”