Centering Community Voice: Byrd Barr Place's Approach to Gun Violence Prevention

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Executive Summary

Gun violence disproportionately affects Black and Brown communities in Seattle and South King County, yet these same communities face barriers to accessing the very data needed to develop informed, community-driven solutions. Byrd Barr Place partnered with LRDG to center community voices in understanding gun violence and to make critical data accessible. When cost barriers prevented the creation of a public dashboard, the project evolved into something more powerful: a community engagement process that amplified resident voices and exposed systemic inequities in data access.

The Challenge

Gun violence is not an abstract policy issue for many Seattle residents—it's a lived reality that shapes daily decisions about where to walk, where children play, and how safe people feel in their own neighborhoods. Black and Brown community members are disproportionately affected, often as bystanders witnessing violence that ripples through their communities.

Byrd Barr Place recognized several interconnected challenges:

Limited Community Voice in Solutions: Most gun violence prevention strategies were developed without meaningful input from the people most affected. Community members—including youth and adults who had experienced gun violence, and those who carried weapons for safety—had crucial insights that weren't being incorporated into prevention efforts.

Inaccessible Data: While government agencies collected extensive data on gun violence using taxpayer dollars, this information wasn't easily accessible to the communities it most affected. Residents couldn't see patterns, understand trends, or use data to inform community-based interventions.

Need for Regional Understanding: Gun violence doesn't respect city boundaries. Understanding the issue required a regional lens that encompassed both Seattle and South King County, examining patterns and impacts across diverse communities.

Representation Gap: Any solutions needed to reflect the perspectives of multiple stakeholder groups: youth and adults affected by gun violence, those who had committed acts of violence, and those carrying weapons for self-protection. Each group held different pieces of the puzzle.

The fundamental question was: How could communities most affected by gun violence be empowered to understand the issue and drive solutions when they couldn't access the very data their tax dollars collected?

The Solution

LRDG and Byrd Barr Place designed a comprehensive community engagement strategy that would center the voices and experiences of those most affected by gun violence.

Multi-Layered Community Engagement

Rather than relying on a single engagement method, LRDG employed multiple approaches to ensure diverse voices were heard:

Community Survey: A survey was created and distributed widely, designed to capture quantitative data on community experiences, concerns, and ideas for solutions.

Listening Sessions: LRDG facilitated listening sessions that created space for community members to share their stories, experiences, and perspectives in depth. These sessions prioritized creating psychologically safe environments where people could speak honestly about difficult topics.

Focus Groups: Targeted focus groups brought together specific populations—youth affected by gun violence, adults who had witnessed violence, individuals who had committed acts of violence, and those who carried weapons for protection. Each group offered unique insights that broadened understanding of the issue's complexity.

Reaching 200+ Community Members: Through these combined methods, LRDG engaged more than 200 residents of Seattle and South King County, ensuring the project reflected genuine community voice rather than assumptions from outside experts.

Confronting the Data Access Barrier

The team worked to create a public-facing dashboard that would display gun violence statistics in a format that was accessible, visually appealing, and easy for community members to understand. However, they encountered a shocking barrier: accessing the data for a single pull would cost nearly $40,000.

This wasn't a one-time expense. The team's vision was for a regularly updated dashboard that communities could reference over time to track trends and measure the impact of interventions. At $40,000 per data pull, creating and maintaining such a dashboard would be financially impossible for community organizations.

Pivoting to Advocacy

Rather than abandoning the project when the dashboard proved financially unfeasible, LRDG and Byrd Barr Place pivoted to address a more fundamental issue: the injustice of data inaccessibility itself.

The team drafted an article for media distribution that posed a critical question: Why are communities that shoulder the heaviest impacts of gun violence unable to access data that their own tax dollars collect?

This shift transformed the project from simply visualizing existing data to advocating for systemic change in how public data is shared and who has access to it.

The Impact

While the project didn't result in the originally envisioned dashboard, it achieved something potentially more significant:

Amplified Community Voice: More than 200 community members—many whose perspectives are typically excluded from policy conversations—had their experiences and ideas documented and elevated.

Exposed Systemic Inequity: The project revealed and publicized the barrier that prevents communities from accessing data about issues affecting their own neighborhoods, sparking conversations about data justice and transparency.

Centered Those Most Affected: By engaging youth and adults who had experienced gun violence firsthand, as well as those who had committed violence or carried weapons for safety, the project captured the full complexity of the issue beyond simplified narratives.

Created Foundation for Advocacy: The community engagement findings and the data access barrier documentation created a foundation for ongoing advocacy work around both gun violence prevention and public data accessibility.

Demonstrated Community Expertise: The listening sessions and focus groups validated what community organizers have long known: those closest to the problem have crucial insights for developing effective solutions.

Critical Lessons Learned

The Byrd Barr Place experience illuminates several important truths about community-based work and data equity:

Community engagement has inherent value, regardless of original objectives. While the dashboard couldn't be created as planned, the process of engaging 200+ community members generated insights and built relationships that have lasting value.

Data access is a justice issue. When communities that bear the brunt of gun violence can't access data about that violence without prohibitive costs, it perpetuates existing power imbalances and hinders community-driven solutions.

Flexibility is essential in community work. The willingness to pivot from creating a dashboard to advocating for data access demonstrates adaptive leadership that responds to on-the-ground realities rather than rigidly adhering to original plans.

Process matters as much as product. The way this work was done—centering community voice, engaging those typically excluded from policy conversations, and building relationships across diverse stakeholder groups—created value independent of any final deliverable.

Barriers can become catalysts. The $40,000 price tag that prevented dashboard creation became the basis for important advocacy work about data transparency and community access to public information.

Looking Forward

The partnership between Byrd Barr Place and LRDG demonstrated that meaningful community engagement around gun violence requires more than good intentions—it demands resources, expertise in facilitating sensitive conversations, and a commitment to centering the voices of those most affected.

It also raised urgent questions about data equity that extend far beyond gun violence: What other publicly collected data is inaccessible to the communities it concerns? How do cost barriers to data access perpetuate inequities and hinder community-based solutions? And how can we create systems where communities have the information they need to advocate for themselves?

For organizations working on gun violence prevention, community safety, or any issue where data access is critical, the Byrd Barr Place experience offers both a model for authentic community engagement and a call to action around data justice.