Alternatives to Violence Builds Momentum on Nations Ford Road

When Robyn Lake Hamilton, president and CEO of Urban League of Central Carolinas (ULCC), spoke at Charlotte City Council’s public forum on Jan. 13, minutes after a presentation from CMPD Chief Johnny Jennings saw council members frustrated with recent crime stats, she was surprised nobody had asked about her work.

It was city council, after all, that funded and assigned ULCC to spearhead the latest Alternatives to Violence program (ATV) along the Nations Ford Road corridor in June 2023.

In the time since, Hamilton said her team is making progress in its efforts to detect and interrupt conflicts, identify and manage high-risk individuals, and change group norms around violence.

“While it’s true that Charlotte, like many other cities, has experienced an increase in homicides, we are seeing encouraging signs of progress within the Alternatives to Violence Program,” Hamilton told council.

The program on Nations Ford Road is the city’s third, following previous roll-outs on Beatties Ford Road near LaSalle Street and on West Boulevard. Each separate ATV team is staffed by area residents trained and hired to practice evidence-based methods of mediation, persuasion, behavior change and norm change.

The previous two programs were run by Youth Advocates Programs, utilizing evidence-based violence reduction training by Cure Violence Global, a model that analyzes violence clusters in the community and uses culturally sensitive paraprofessional health workers to interrupt the violence epidemic.

Read more: New Alternatives to Violence Team Launches on West Boulevard

ULCC is following a similar model that aims to analyze what’s happened in the recent past to prevent similar incidents in the future.

“We’re now trying to work a little bit backwards,” Hamilton said of ATV’s proactive approach. “We’re like, ‘Okay, how do you keep it from getting started?’”

The Nations Ford’s program oversees a 1.5-mile area on and around the corridor. Though active for well over a year now, Hamilton said people still don’t know that the south side is home to one of these initiatives.

The neighborhood has been plagued with gun violence in recent years, contributing to a bad reputation among residents and city leaders. In 2024, Queen City Nerve tracked 12 murders in the area bordered by East Arrowood Road, Nations Ford Road, Archdale Drive and South Boulevard, including three homicides in December alone.

Hamilton referred to the area as a “resources desert.” For example, the corridor was left out in 2020 when the city launched its Corridors of Opportunity program, pumping money into six historically under-invested corridors.

Transforming Nations Ford — a nonprofit community coalition that advocates for southwest Charlotte’s 28273, 28277, 28217, and 28210 zip codes — spent much of 2024 lobbying council and other local officials to help turn a piece of city-owned land into a park and incubator space for local nonprofits.

As the year drew to a close, the group began advocating for the development of a regional recreation center at Ramblewood Park to help address the community needs facing the corridors: economic challenges, linguistic isolation, community violence, educational gaps, health and safety.

The December announcement that the area would lose its nearest YMCA location drew more concern around the lack of options for young people in the Nations Ford/Arrowood corridor, where 30% of residents are under the age of 18.

For Hamilton, the lack of resources presents an opportunity for the program to work directly with neighborhood residents and get them what they need. The historic disinvestment in Nations Ford drives her work at ATV.

“[That] is why we want to start doing a lot more,” Hamilton said, “so the violence doesn’t start as opposed to having to respond in a reactive way.”

The team has identified three strategies that it wants to implement in 2025 to decrease conflict on Nations Ford Road: convening long-term stay providers, empowering apartment communities, and creating space for community members to connect.

Alternatives to Violence gets proactive

Even longtime residents involved with the ATV team have found “a different vibe” in the neighborhoods where they’re working than anticipated, said Hamilton. The communities are particularly transient, with folks frequently moving in and out of long-term and extended-stay motels.

They’ve found a correlation between hotspots where multiple criminal incidents are reported and the areas where certain long-term stay providers are. One of the ATV program’s goals is to pinpoint which long-term and extended-stay providers see the most incidents and bring them together.

“We want to talk to [community leaders and residents] and foster some sort of understanding of what we’re trying to do and equip them with … tools that address resident needs proactively,” Hamilton said.

ATV program-provided tools could mean training community leaders and hotel/motel owners and managers with violence-interruption training to mediate potentially lethal conflicts and address follow-up steps to ensure conflicts don’t rekindle.

These violence clusters are not unique to long-term stay providers but are also prevalent within apartment communities.

Similarly to extended-stay providers, certain apartment complexes are linked with a disproportionate amount of violence in the area. Hamilton wants to empower these complexes by equipping apartment managers with proven strategies to boost resident engagement and resolve issues before they escalate.

The program’s goal is to convene affected long-term stay providers and apartment community administrators to discuss possible solutions.

The responsibility of prevention and intervention doesn’t just fall on the provider and manager’s shoulders, Hamilton said. Because violence affects a variety of people, it’s the community’s responsibility to have open and honest dialogue on how to properly address and get ahead of violence.

But without designated spaces to connect, communication throughout a community becomes stagnant. The ATV program’s third and final strategy is to build spaces for community members to celebrate their diversity and community pride.

Hamilton said the community has long felt disconnected, segregated into three groups: the Latinx community, the African American community and the commercial community. ATV has worked to connect these communities by building relationships with local churches and growing its bilingual staff to communicate with Spanish-speaking residents.

“It’s been nice to be a center focal point of bringing all those scenarios together,” Hamilton said.

ATV is now looking into creating funding for lot cleanups to create much-needed space for these different communities to connect. Gathering volunteers to clean up vacant lots is a proven strategy to not only discourage vagrancy but give the community something to take pride in.

“From our activity, what we’re seeing on the ground is increased community integration and stronger support networks,” she said. “And what we’re trying to do is grow a sense of hope, which I believe that we’re doing.”

Curing a violence epidemic without police intervention

During CMPD’s annual end-of-year report on Jan. 17, officials detailed the work of the Coordinated Overlap Response Effort (CORE), which launched in the fourth quarter of 2024 to increase officers’ presence in areas with high crime rates. The program deploys officers from CMPD’s 13 patrol divisions into three main hotspots including the Nations Ford/Arrowood Road corridors.

CMPD reported the effort led to 75 seized firearms and 123 arrests in two months, which CMPD Chief Johnny Jennings believed played a key role in the 4% decrease in violent crime citywide in the fourth quarter of 2024.

The Cure Violence Global model that ATV facilitates in southwest Charlotte does not include integration with local police departments. In fact, the model intentionally remains separate from CMPD in order to maintain the credibility needed to work with those at highest risk, the website states.

ULCC offers additional programming to address the root causes of violence by offering workforce development, education or something as simple as a ride for a neighbor to get their driver’s license reinstated.

Hamilton’s presence at the city council meeting’s public hearing, though cut short before she could finish, was meant to encourage council members to take the program into consideration while planning for the Fiscal Year 2026 budget.

For now, ATV staff’s focus remains on uniting, improving and creating environmental collaboration within the Nations Ford community. That’s where Hamilton feels the difference has begun compared to the disjointed community she saw in the beginning of the program.

And as a result of ATV’s focus and attention, Hamilton believes we’re going to see reduced violent crimes.

“We’re not going to wait until 2026,” she said. “We’ve identified [these strategies] and we want to keep the momentum we’ve got going.”