The kicks against her front door sent vibrations through the walls of Natasha's West Side apartment. She huddled in the corner of her bedroom, trembling fingers struggling with her phone as she dialed the one person she thought might answer: Victoria, a victim advocate from Together Chicago assigned to her block. All night Natasha had been shivering alone, stricken after her son Orlando had been shot, and now she was trapped, potentially facing the same fate.

Victoria picked up immediately. The bereaved mother explained that someone was trying to break in, possibly the same person who had shot her son. Victoria's voice carried audible compassion as she responded: "Hold on. I'm going to get some backup. I'll call you back in two minutes." She dialed Together Chicago's office, where staff had gathered for their Monday morning meeting. It was the day after Easter, and the team was processing the aftermath of a mass shooting in the Austin neighborhood, where four men had been wounded and, in a separate incident nearby, five women killed—the youngest just sixteen. They were also still strategizing their response to a shooting on Christiana Avenue from the previous weekend. But when Victoria's voice came through the smartphone speaker, the room fell silent.

"I don't know what to do," Victoria said to the group now huddled around the phone, her voice wavering with the weight of the emergency she had just absorbed. "I just promised to call her back after talking to you all."

Michael Allen, a longtime pastor and Together Chicago's co-founder, sat closest to the phone. He raised his arm and leaned toward the speakerphone: "Victoria, thank you for calling us. You can let her know that we will help her." Strength rippled through his voice: "We will help that family get to safety."

Victoria's call that Monday morning wasn't just a crisis, it was a test of all that Together Chicago had been building. Within an hour, their network had activated: a hotel room secured through a business partner, neighbors alerted through their block club network, and a long-term safety plan taking shape through their victim advocacy team. "When someone calls at 2 am, you need more than programs," someone leaned over to tell me, an observer. "You need people who will actually show up."

This is Together Chicago in action—a prayer initiative turned collective impact effort that emerged in 2017 to confront Chicago's epidemic of gun violence. The organization operates like an inspired zone defense still finding its rhythm in the unpredictable flow of street-level crisis. Together Chicago represents an attempt to demonstrate what happens when a municipal crisis submits to the discipline of communal prayer and an unlikely weave of civic friendships.

"We need each other," says Damien Howard, a veteran educator in Chicago's public schools and TC's Director of Education Initiatives. "Real change in Chicago requires a camaraderie and togetherness that this city hasn't seen before." His words become flesh in the organization's daily operations, where their own internal culture reflects their external approach. Staff meetings begin with a devotional followed by data analysis. When conflicts arise between team members, they use the same reconciliation practices they teach others. "We can't create what we don't embody," explains Howard. "If we can't work through our own divisions, how can we help the city?"

The seeds of Together Chicago were planted in 2012, as Chicago and the nation confronted a resurgence of racial division and police brutality. Longtime pastor Erwin W. Lutzer of Moody Church turned to his colleague at Park Community Church, Dr. John Fuder, with a question that would prove prescient: "What if God could use you to push a whole lot of us into a posture of prayer over our city?"

The timing was critical. Chicago stood at an inflection point, its longstanding divisions carved by decades of restrictive covenants, redlining, and discriminatory housing policies having created not just geographic separation, but parallel realities existing side by side in mutual incomprehension. Life expectancy could vary by up to 30 years between neighborhoods just miles apart. Schools, job opportunities, healthcare access, exposure to violence—nearly every measure of wellbeing revealed stark disparities determined by zip code.

"We weren't just dealing with statistics," recalls Fuder (known affectionately as "Doc"). "We were facing the accumulated weight of generations of systemic inequality. Prayer wasn't just spiritual—it was a way of beginning to bear that weight together." Through his nearly two decades at Moody Bible Institute, Doc had woven connections throughout Chicago's faith communities through the school's internship program. The question hit him at a ripe moment. His response—creating a prayer guide covering all 77 of the city's neighborhoods—seemed modest. But like many mustard seeds, its simplicity bore unexpected power.

The guide catalyzed a gathering in January 2014 called "Pray Chicago," drawing over 1,000 people to Park Community Church. These weren't just prayer meetings; they were experiments in crossing Chicago's demographic and geographic boundaries. As weather warmed, they moved outdoors to parks like Douglass and McKinley—areas of concentrated poverty. One local pastor, who had been skeptical at first, found himself moved by what he witnessed. "Here were people from the north side praying alongside folks from the south side," he remembers. "Not just praying about the city, but praying with each other. That was different."

Yet prayer alone wasn't enough. "Doc," said one Black pastor to Fuder during a particularly violent weekend, "we get this prayer thing, but in my neighborhood, bullets fly, people die. We need to get out of the seats and into the streets." It was an articulation of the tension that would become the creative friction giving birth to Together Chicago as a civic marriage of contemplation and action.

Around this time, Pastor Michael Allen was leading Uptown Baptist Church in Chicago's "United Nations neighborhood," a mile northeast of Wrigley Field. One day, as his team served meals to homeless neighbors, gunshots shattered the peace. Allen stepped outside to find five people bleeding on the church steps. The incident transformed any abstraction he may have carried around the issue into a visceral, proximate hell. "The blood spilled at the doorway to the church was the pivotal point for me," Allen recalls. "I knew I needed to do something more about the violence. I just didn't know exactly what. After much prayer and conversations with our church Elders and Staff, I sensed God saying, 'You need to lead the church to minister to people on both sides of the gun… victims and perpetrators.'”

That "what" would find its inception through an unlikely partnership. David Dillon had built a successful career in Chicago's business and tech sectors, respected across the city's elite circles. But as gun violence increasingly dominated headlines, he found himself wrestling with questions that he couldn't answer. Born to missionary parents in Japan, he was no stranger to getting inside a different viewpoint. He decided to immerse himself in studying the Great Migration, Chicago's highway development, and decades of housing policies that had systematically barred Black families from building equity.

"What I learned changed everything," Dillon recalls. "It wasn't just about statistics anymore. I learned that the way the city had been formed wasn’t random. There were well-documented, intentional decisions that had been made that created painful injustice for those on the south and west sides of the city, and the world of business and politics was deeply implicated in those decisions.” Though there were many great pastors, churches, and organizations making a real difference in their communities, he was finding a lack of coordinated response to the escalating violence in the city, especially across racial lines. “The body of Christ is about many things, including truth, mercy, and justice. And that body isn't just theoretical, it's real. I needed to know: What can we, this one body of Christ, be doing across racial lines—in the reality of where we live—to be a meaningful part of bringing those things to the city of Chicago?"

In 2016, Chicago experienced over 4,300 shootings. Politicians seemed paralyzed and existing programs were struggling to stem the tide. Dillon began reaching out to his faith networks with a simple but urgent question: "We can't just sit by and watch. What is our response to this?"

So began a journey that was far from straightforward. Those questions led to a weekend retreat that brought together an unprecedented mix of pastors and business leaders from across Chicago's divides. "We just prayed together and talked and got to know each other," Dillon recalls. "By God's grace, the Spirit moved there. We had some tears; we had some fun." Michael Allen agrees, "We all put our hands together in prayer, like The Three Musketeers, only there were about 25 of us... everybody said, 'Yes, we must do this, and we must do it together.'"

The strategy begins with the table.

In meeting rooms across Chicago's divided geography, Together Chicago orchestrates what they call “Building Blocks of Peace” each spring. Police commanders and officers sit next to pastors, non-profit leaders sit next to South Side community organizers, and city officials sit next to business leaders. These aren't one-off events or feel-good photo opportunities. Honest conversations are had regarding the current challenges in different communities. Pastors are encouraged to continue to move their congregations towards innovative methods of engagement, such as the “Hands Across Chicago” event. Every Memorial Day hundreds of people of faith physically join hands across entire city blocks going south to north in an outward demonstration of the unity in the body of Christ, praying for unity, peace, and the thriving of the city that they love.

"Moving from events to movement" is how Doc, who now leads the organization's prayer and faith community mobilization efforts, describes TC’s distinctive approach. Together Chicago works in seasonal rhythms, anchored in a wisdom about the deep, slow, and crucially cyclical work required to build momentum. Relationships bloom organically yet intentionally out of their own merits, not from crisis where the need to know someone becomes an urgent if temporary tool needed for survival before fading back into the mists of sociological comfort—the habits that keep us separated in our silos. "Historically speaking," Allen explains, "people who live on the West Side very seldom go on the South Side or the North Side. Likewise, people on the South Side have failed to go on the North Side. There's just this invisible barrier in people's minds and hearts."

But in a move that places purposeful ritual—less demographic difference as such—at the center, Together Chicago invites people into its work through the rhythms of the year’s seasons. Winter is allotted for prayer, spring for training, summer for heightened street engagement, and fall for relationship-building and evaluation. “Our wheel of change has to be in tune with the patterns of human mood and behavior throughout the year,” says Doc. Going by seasons that are familiar to each human being allows Together Chicago to orient its flywheel around an axle that hints of Benedictine wisdom—a rule of life that for centuries has proven itself capable of building the kind of internal bonds and interior strength needed for when unexpected crises come.

Still, staff members admit that when you’re building the plane while flying it, especially when the needs are so acute, the commitment to building a cross-class, cross-sector weave for its own sake can seem luxurious. "Sometimes we have to say no to urgent needs because we're investing in long-term relationships," admits Allen. "That's hard. But we've learned that rushing in without relationships often does more harm than good."

Early in TC’s planning, David Dillon was impacted by research showing that deep societal change is accelerated through what scholars call "collective impact"—different sectors of society working in coordinated ways toward common goals. This insight shaped Together Chicago's unique "hub and spoke" model as well as their deep connectivity with leaders across the city. Regular, citywide gatherings serve as the hub, bringing together their entire network for prayer, strategic planning, and relationship building. These gatherings rotate between different neighborhoods, ensuring that everyone steps out of their comfort zones and experiences different parts of the city. The "spokes" are neighborhood-based teams that meet more frequently, implementing strategies tailored to local needs while maintaining connections to the wider network.

Together Chicago is part of the coalition Communities Partnering for Peace, known locally as CP4P. CP4P has brought together like-minded organizations to provide funding, training, and collaboration to the shared violence prevention work in Chicago. “CP4P has been a huge help to our staff. Our street outreach workers have become more professional in their work and our case managers have become certified through the training that’s been provided,” says Lavonas Troupe, Director of Violence Reduction.

This structure supports their integrated programs, each designed to cross traditional boundaries. Today, Together Chicago's infrastructure includes over 90 staff members working across five integrated focus areas—violence reduction, education, economic development, Gospel Justice Centers, and faith community mobilization—each program area representing a web of relationships that transform how resources and opportunities flow through the city.

Take their education initiative. At Doolittle Elementary on Chicago’s South Side, a partnership that began with simple mentoring efforts has grown into a transformative force for students, families, and the surrounding community. "We originally came in thinking we knew what was best," admits Damien Howard, Director of Education Initiatives at Together Chicago. "But through conversations with Principal Iysha Jones and her team, we learned that real change required more than just tutoring—it demanded a holistic approach."

Over the past four years, Together Chicago’s Love Your School initiative has brought mentorship, training in Social Emotional Learning (SEL) for parents, student leadership development, and more than $17,000 in donations to support student success. But perhaps the most striking impact has been in literacy. In 2024 alone, the number of students at Doolittle Elementary reading at or above grade level increased from seven to 30—a 328% increase.

“The numbers tell part of the story,” Principal Jones explains. “But what’s even more powerful is the shift in our school’s culture. Our students are engaged, our families feel more connected, and our teachers have seen the benefits of SEL in the classroom.”

TC’s educational impact extends beyond Doolittle. With 123 schools and over 3,000 students served in 2023-2024, the organization has helped mobilize churches, mentors, and community partners to reduce school violence, increase student engagement, and provide critical support for families. The Love Your School Collective, a network of churches and organizations working together for educational equity, now plays an important role in working to reduce the number of students who fall through the cracks, and where school culture ratings reflect thriving, engaged communities. "The key," Howard says, "is collective action. When churches, nonprofits, schools, and families align, the impossible starts to feel hopeful."

TC's Gospel Justice Centers embody similar principles of integration. What began as a simple idea to resource and support those needing legal help has turned into a robust program in 21 churches across the city through partnership with Administer Justice (another non-profit in the area with national reach). As community members come in—often with anxiety due to past justice system experiences—they are warmly greeted by those in the church, and meet with a caring attorney who is volunteering his or her time to help. Often, those same community members walk out with tears of joy, because someone cared and they have received the legal counsel they so desperately needed. Over the years, hundreds of individuals have seen complex legal matters sensitively handled, and many have begun to see their local church in a new light—as a resource and a caring community. Some have since joined the church.

Alvin Bibbs, the TC Community and Faith Engagement Officer who directs the Gospel Justice Centers and grew up in the Cabrini Green Housing Development says, “In all my years in Chicago I’ve never seen this level of commitment and engagement by churches in an urban context to serve the community and its residents.”

Their approach to violence prevention reflects this same boundary-crossing focus. When Commander Roderick Watson, a 28-year veteran of the Chicago Police Department, joins pastors to visit young men involved in violence, these encounters bridge divides between law enforcement and the community that once seemed insurmountable. In Englewood, these visits have evolved into regular basketball games, where officers and young men compete on mixed teams, followed by conversations about neighborhood challenges.

"The basketball court becomes neutral ground," explains Watson. "We're not officers and suspects there—we're just guys playing ball, talking about life." These relationships have proven crucial during moments of tension. When a controversial police shooting threatened to spark violence last summer, these informal networks helped maintain peace. "The young men we play basketball with became mediators in their own neighborhoods," Watson notes. "That's not something you can program—it only happens through genuine relationship."

The numbers validate this approach. On the Near West Side, where TC has maintained a consistent presence, homicides have been reduced by 37% and shooting incidents have decreased by 23% over the last three years. The numbers fluctuate but overall TC has seen a significant multi-year reduction in shootings for the five communities they have focused on in their violence reduction work.

Perhaps the most telling metric is what happens when crisis hits. Now, response time takes hours, not days, thanks to strengthened relationship networks. "We track things like how many times people from different neighborhoods have shared meals in each other's homes," explains Allen. "We look at whether church members are attending weddings and funerals across neighborhood lines. These might seem like small things, but they're actually profound indicators of real relationship."

Even their prayer mobilization takes tangible form. Weekly prayer walks pair churches from different neighborhoods, with routes intentionally crossing gang territory boundaries. These aren't just spiritual exercises; walkers carry resource cards listing job opportunities, mental health services, and emergency housing options. They stop to talk with residents, note buildings that need repair, and often return to help address specific needs they discover. Through these walks, they've discovered needs that led to new initiatives, including a weekly farmers' market in a neighborhood that lacked fresh food options.

The summer of 2023 tested Together Chicago like never before. As temperatures rose, so did tensions across the city. Memorial Day weekend saw 51 people shot, 11 fatally. Block parties and gatherings that should have been celebrations became targets. Emergency rooms filled. Social media feuds escalated into street violence.

"That summer pushed us to our limits," recalls Victoria. "We were responding to multiple crises every day while trying to maintain our long-term work." The tension between immediate response and relationship building became acute. Some staff advocated for shifting all resources to crisis intervention. Others worried about abandoning the patient work of relationship building that had proven so crucial.

The organization's response revealed both the strength and the challenge of their model. When a series of retaliatory shootings threatened to spiral in East Garfield Park, their network activated in waves. First came the immediate crisis response—victim advocates, violence interrupters, emergency housing. But alongside this, longer-term relationships began to work in unexpected ways.

"I got a call from a business owner in Lincoln Park who'd met some of our youth at an 'unlikely dinner' months before," says Howard. "He offered summer jobs to kids from the affected blocks. A suburban church opened their facilities for emergency programming. These weren't just crisis responses, they were relationships becoming load-bearing structures."

This emphasis on sustained presence hasn't come without cost. Initial attempts to partner suburban resources with urban needs sometimes reinforced paternalistic attitudes rather than building genuine relationships. Their first violence intervention approaches, focused solely on individual shooters, missed the wider network of relationships that drive conflict.

Yet these failures proved instructive. "We had to learn to think differently about time," explains Allen. "American philanthropy wants quick wins, clear metrics. But you can't rush the rebuilding of trust. You can't accelerate the healing of historical wounds."

The renowned pastor at Progressive Baptist Church, Reverend Charlie Dates, has been so impressed by Together Chicago’s vision that he committed to serve as a founding member of the Board of Directors. "I think TC is the best vehicle right now for the church to holistically impact the city,” he said. “What has kept TC from happening before now has been the arrogance of the pulpit in Chicago. These guys wouldn't work together. Now they are—across racial, denominational, and sector lines. The impact shows up not just in reduced violence or improved schools but in new models of shared leadership, rebuilt trust between communities, restored hope that peace can indeed walk in power."

As I spent time with Together Chicago over three months in the spring of 2024—observing their staff, following their networks, walking their neighborhoods—I began to recognize patterns I'd seen in my study of enduring social movements. The ingredients that make up what Gal Beckerman calls “the quiet before,” the first stage—usually hidden—of intentional friendships being knit around shared sight of a problem.

They were all there: the dream that encompasses everyone's transformation, not just the protection of some. The personal conversion that precedes social change. The creation of an alternative world with its own rhythms and rituals, from those unlikely relationships to the seasonal cycles of prayer and action. The clear moral vision combined with practical competence. The embrace of unlikely partnerships across every conceivable divide. The patience to build deep relationships matched with the readiness to respond in crisis.

What makes Together Chicago distinctive isn't just their programs or even their results, but how they've created what scholars of social movements call a "seedbed"—the fertile soil from which lasting transformation grows. In a culture that defaults to celebrity and quick fixes, they've chosen the hidden work of relationship building. In an age that prefers public performance to private transformation, they've invested in the slow work of trust.

Looking ahead, Together Chicago faces both opportunity and challenge. The city's ongoing struggles with post-pandemic recovery, persistent inequality, and the implementation of promised reforms highlight the urgent need for their relationship-centered approach. Yet that very urgency tests their commitment to patient, sustainable change.

"We're learning that scale doesn't always mean getting bigger," explains Howard. "Sometimes it means going deeper, strengthening the relationships we have so they can bear more weight." Rather than rushing to expand geographically, they're focusing on deepening their existing networks, strengthening what they call their "relationship density"—the number and quality of connections across traditional boundaries. They are aware that though they have close to 200 churches and many non-profits that are engaged with them in some way there are many more churches and non-profits that aren’t. There is humility and growth yet ahead.

The morning that Victoria called TC’s office about Natasha's crisis, the staff had gathered for their regular Monday meeting following Easter. TC’s chief church liaison officer, Bishop Ed Peecher, had offered a devotional: "Ponder Christ’s line: ‘It is finished,’" he said. "We need to remember that we have Resurrection power for everyday life." It’s a belief that fuels TC’s persistence to this day.

"The problems in Chicago took generations to create," says Allen. "They won't be solved overnight. But what we're seeing is that when you bring people together in the right way, with the right spirit, with genuine commitment to each other—change becomes possible. Not just program-level change, but the kind of deep change that can transform a city."

As Chicago faces an uncertain future, Together Chicago offers not just a model but a method: the patient, persisting work of weaving relationships across divides. It's not the quick fix that politicians promise or that traumatized communities understandably crave. "It's slow work," Dillon says. "It's hard work. But we're seeing something beautiful happen." In a large city organized too often by its divisions, Together Chicago is demonstrating what becomes possible when people commit to crossing historical barriers, say yes to a beautiful hope, and intentionally work to become the very fabric they seek to repair.