a special message from NJPAC CEO John Schreiber

Newark’s innovative Office of Violence Prevention and Trauma Recovery hosts community concert

As the country’s most diverse performing arts center, NJPAC’s Social Impact programming is at the heart of how we define ourselves as an anchor cultural institution.

We host a theater-making workshop for the recently incarcerated to help them reintegrate with their communities. We led a unique public-private partnership to develop a TV and film production studio in Newark’s South Ward.

We partnered with Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey to offer hundreds of patients across Newark “prescriptions” for free arts activities — concerts, glass-blowing classes, museum tours — to capitalize on the health benefits that research shows engaging with the arts provides.

Sometimes, to fulfill your mission, you have to look beyond the ways things are traditionally done.

A tendency to push innovation in service to the community is, I think, something of a Newark trademark.

NJPAC is far from the only organization in this city pioneering new collaborative approaches to complex challenges.

One shining example: The city’s Office of Violence Prevention and Trauma Recovery (OVPTR), a prime mover in Newark’s remarkable reduction in violent crime over the past decade.

“When Mayor Baraka took office [in 2014], there were 112 homicides a year in Newark. In 2024, we reached a 60-year low, 37 homicides,” says Kyleesha Wingfield-Hill, who was named Director of the office in January 2024.

“I’m not going to say only 37, because one life lost is too many. But we accomplished a lot, and much of that is because we invested in the community.”

The OVPTR doesn’t focus on what you might think of as traditional methods for reducing crime: an increase in arrests, or more cops and more security cameras on city streets.

Instead, the agency focuses on making the community safer by ensuring that the community is cared for, in all kinds of ways — families fed and housed, children well educated, seniors kept healthy and neighbors brought together in fellowship.

So far, it’s been an exceptionally successful approach.

But it isn’t an easy one in a city where, as Wingfield-Hill points out, the latest data show that the average family income is $53,818.

“I walk around with ShopRite gift cards in my pockets, because I am always running into mothers who need help feeding their families,” Wingfield-Hill says.

The OVPTR efforts are geared toward preventing anyone’s circumstances from becoming so dire that they turn to violence; it’s prevention by removing the root causes of violence.

“Because how do we expect kids to stay out of trouble if they’re not in school? And how are we expecting a kid to do well in school if they don’t know where their next meal is coming from? It’s so layered,” Wingfield-Hill explains.

So the OVPTR hosts everything from Laundry Days — when single moms can access laundromats for free — to community movie nights, to mentorship programs. Recently, the OVPTR began paying college tuition at Saint Elizabeth University for 40 Newark teens who’d lost a parent to violence or to incarceration, but still managed to graduate high school.

And then there are the “Pop Up Play Streets.”

“In every hotspot area, the parts of the city that have the most crime, that’s where we go in with bouncy houses, food and music,” Wingfield-Hill explains. And when the community comes out to enjoy themselves, Wingfield-Hill’s team can be on hand to offer them all kinds of services, from care packages of menstrual products to information about therapeutic services and transportation that can bring kids to summer camps.

You might not think that presenting and producing the performing arts would be a part of violence prevention either, but at the OVPTR, it is. Every year, the agency joins community groups to help present 24 Hrs of Peace, a concert and festival designed to harness hip hop and spoken word poetry as violence prevention measures. Founded by Mayor Baraka, his brother and chief of staff Amiri Baraka Jr. and visionary hip hop artist and educator Hakim Green over a decade ago, the free celebration has featured major hip hop stars including Queen Latifah, Redman and Ghostface Killah. Jadakiss, DaBaby and Kool G Rap will perform this year.

“The arts are what get people up and out,” Wingfield-Hill says. “Music, poetry – when we tell people there’s an artist coming to their neighborhood, people who we could never reach before come out.”

“Then we have resource tables, we have folks tracking data, we have everyone in one place. Then we can figure out how to meet people where they are.”

This year’s 24 Hrs of Peace concert will be held this Friday and Saturday, September 5 and 6, along Central Avenue in the West Ward. NJPAC is proud to provide some of the musicians and poets who will help make the event special.

In between concerts and bouncy house deployments, the OVPTR sends teams to do wellness checks up and down the streets with the highest incidents of violent crime, offering information on available social services and surveying residents about what else they need.

“When we look at our communities, we don’t see a lack of talent, what we see is a lack of resources,” she says.

No one social service program alone is a panacea. But overlapping programs, and Wingfield-Hill’s team’s work in ensuring that community members are aware of the services they are eligible for, peel away one “layer” after another of the circumstances that lead to violence.

And they do a lot of other good besides, as Wingfield-Hill has known almost her whole life.

Wingfield-Hill was born in Orange. Her grandmother raised her and her seven siblings because their mother suffered from addiction, and their father was incarcerated.

“I could have a whole conversation about growing up with limited resources. I have always needed the government — and I knew as a kid I wanted to figure out how to work in the government after college, I wanted to be a public servant. Because there was a community of people who decided to be responsible for me. I’ve spent my career asking: ‘How do I become who I needed then?’” she says.

Despite the challenging circumstances of her childhood, Wingfield-Hill pursued her dream of public service, landing an internship with Lieutenant Governor Sheila Oliver at age 16. She got a bachelor’s degree at Kean University, then a master’s in public administration at Fairleigh Dickinson University, then returned to Orange to work in the administration of Mayor Dwayne D. Warren. She also became Orange’s youngest-ever school board member.

“When I came back home, I was coming to save my city, to save kids who look like me. I was like: ‘Power to the people!’ I thought I could save everyone,” she recalls.

After 10 years in various government roles, in both Orange and Newark, she admits that “the burnout is real — whenever you accomplish one thing, the next thing is already on your doorstep.”

And while enormous progress has been made in Newark, even one act of violence has a shattering effect on the community around it. Wingfield-Hill had that truth brought home to her over the summer, when a young woman she was mentoring, a 16-year-old girl, was shot and killed.

“Sixteen years old, and her mother’s only child — how can you explain that? I took an entire week off to cry,” she recalls.

And then, of course, she went right back to work.