The fourth annual Families Against Violent Acts community-resource fair is held in the vast parking lot in front of Now Faith Church in Montbello. Pastor Emerson was good enough to offer the space to the mothers of FAVA. That’d be FAVAsounds like “favor,” as in doing right by others and by God. FAVA members are nothing if not devout. I can’t say whether their personal tragedies have made them more so. I didn’t know them before FAVA came into being in 2007.
They set up 26 booths, a couple of inflatable kiddie castles, a car show and a hot-dog station. Everything free. Everything volunteer. Nearly all the booths offer information on local services, including the local library branch, a battered-women’s shelter, the Community College of Denver, a preschool, a nonprofit that works with men coming out of jail.
Thomas Gilbert is the master of ceremonies, and he does his best to exhort a crowd wilting beneath the afternoon heat: “Come on now! I can’t hear you.”
The folks manning the booths fan themselves with brochures, elbows propped on tabletops, listening to Gilbert. Dianne Cooks, FAVA’s director, is here. She’s hard to miss. Like the other FAVA moms, she’s wearing a neon-orange T-shirt that reads: “Stop the Violence. Mend the broken-hearted.” Cooks has somehow managed to find a headband that matches her T-shirt, and she’s working the crowd, passing out the hugs and the how-ya-doin’s.
“You remember my son?” she asks me. I do. Michael Hope, 28, shot in 2005, left paralyzed from the waist down, a man with a brilliant smile and a strong handshake. Lola Morris is here too. She’s group chaplain. Morris is not the mother of a victim of violence. She is the mother of a son, now 21, who was sentenced to 64 years in a 2006 drive-by shooting that ended the life of a teenage girl.
Cooks names the other FAVA mothers at the fair: “Let’s see. Sherri Landrum. Her son was killed in 2004. Venita Johnson-Myers. Her son was killed in January coming out of the liquor store. Three other men were shot. Her son died. She’s still going to trial right now. Sharletta Evans, you remember her? Her 3-year-old son, Casson, was killed about 14 years ago. And Joanne Lewis. Her son was locked up as one of the two involved in Sharletta’s son’s death.”
This bringing together of mothers of victims and perpetrators is what sets FAVA apart. It’s not an easy accommodation. We are accustomed to assigning value to grief, to proportioning sympathy based on the grievousness of the wound inflicted. In such a measurement system, the parents of the perpetrator will always lose to the parents of the victim.
FAVA exists as an act of extraordinary generosity, as an acknowledgment: Love of a child, like loss of a child, has no measure. It resists calibration. It defies logic. In the aftermath of violence, there is more than enough suffering to go around.
The FAVA mothers meet the first Wednesday of most months. They sit in a room just inside the church. They talk. They listen. They seek a way forward.
The community-resource fair is their message. Trust us, it says. You don’t want to sit where we sit. So, look, here’s a person to talk to, a program to help keep your kids on the right path. We’ll eat a little food, listen to a little music and have ourselves a fine time.
“We can find strength and help if we just work together for the same cause: our children, our lives, our livelihoods,” Morris tells me.
The heat lets up, and spirits rise. Gilbert calls for all the young people to come forward. “We’re just going to talk for a minute.”
He conducts an impromptu interview with a youth-outreach worker, Terrance Roberts, who is also a former gang member. Roberts sums up his story, and Gilbert stops him: “You kind of breezed through that, the whole getting shot a couple times. You were at the house making ice cream and baking cakes at the time, right? What were you doing?” Roberts tells him all his friends were in gang life at the time.
“So, rather than searching out your own identity, you just followed what everyone else was doing?” Gilbert says. He turns to the young people. “You are far too valuable to allow someone else to put your identity together. You are not who the media says you are. You are who God created you to be.”
There is more singing and dancing. A troupe of Mexican Chinelo dancers performs. Shuffle, hop, shuffle. It’s irresistible, and they are joined by some in the crowd and by members of the Starlites drill team.
The drill team marches, and the young ladies dazzle, hands clapping out complicated rhythms, feet stomping, drums rat-tat-tatting, crowd cheering. There always will be days when the mothers gather and weep, but this glorious Saturday afternoon in a church parking lot filled with music is not one of them.
Tina Griego writes Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Reach her at 303-954-2699 or tgriego@denverpost.com.
