The Neighborhood Safety Community Council helps Office of Neighborhood Safety keep our City safer by supporting innovative violence prevention efforts. One such program is Community Advocates and Violence Educators (CAVE), a project of HIRED that hosts education sessions and group activities for at-risk youth in Saint Paul.
Since the grant began in January 2023, CAVE has conducted twelve gun violence prevention events, connecting with 198 young people so far — 52 of whom made what the program calls a Gun Safe Commitment. But that’s not all CAVE does to help protect our City.
After federal SNAP benefits were suspended on November 1 this year, people and organizations citywide, including City government, mobilized quickly to keep our neighbors from going hungry. CAVE participants did too. Together they collected over 100 pounds of food donations for CLUES, a Latino economic empowerment organization headquartered on the East Side.
The CAVE food drive shows how young people in Saint Paul are taking community safety into their own hands — not only by tackling gun violence directly, but also by meeting the basic human needs we all share.