Violence interrupters and outreach workers in D.C. often sacrifice their physical safety and emotional well-being trying to prevent shootings and reduce violence in D.C.’s neighborhoods. They work directly with residents who are at risk of being a victim or perpetrator of violence, and encourage them to change their lives.

As this workforce expands and responds to an increase in homicides in the District, a newly launched program called the DC Peace Academy is aiming to equip them with the skills they need to do their jobs well and advance their careers. It’s based on the idea that violence interrupters and outreach workers deserve training just like police. But at the Peace Academy, instead of being instructed on how to carry a taser and gun, violence intervention workers will receive training in how to mediate and resolve neighborhood conflicts that lead to violence — and at the same time, learn how to manage their own trauma and prevent burnout during the process.

“The city has come a long way in the last four years to build up a strong [violence intervention] workforce,” says Lashonia Thompson-El, the Executive Director of Peace for DC, which is funding and running the DC Peace Academy. The District now employs more than 300 frontline violence intervention workers through government contracts. But now is the time to invest in the well-being and professional development of this workforce, Thompson-El says. “We want to see violence intervention programs everywhere where they’re needed, but we also want to see our staff get the resources and support that they need to do a great job.”

The DC Peace Academy, which launched on Tuesday with its first cohort of 25 students, is a 13-week training program for frontline workers in D.C.’s neighborhoods with the highest rates of shootings and homicides. The program is financed with private donations, through the Peace for DC fund at the Greater Washington Community Foundation. But there is also a heavy government presence, as many of the people leading the Peace Academy —and all of its students — work for community-based organizations that the D.C. government contracts with to do violence intervention work.

About 80 people gathered at the Anacostia Busboys and Poets location on Tuesday to celebrate the academy’s first day of courses – including violence interrupters and outreach workers, faith leaders, nonprofit leaders, and current and former government officials from several D.C. agencies. Speakers at the event stressed the importance of the Peace Academy being a collaborative effort connecting people across the city: D.C.’s violence interruption programs have been criticized for lacking coordination.

“I’m hoping and praying that we can get to a place where we can learn to build trust with one another, break down these silos, and really get serious about this work so that we can make a difference … in the communities that we love, the neighborhoods that are at the highest risk of gun violence,” Thompson-El told the crowd.

Fierra Green, 35, is among the inaugural class of DC Peace Academy students. She says she’s hoping the program will improve her communication skills and advance her ability to prevent conflicts in the neighborhoods where she works.

“I’m always up to learning new things – anything that will help with the work that we do in the community,” says Green.

Green is currently an outreach worker with the National Association for the Advancement of Returning Citizens’ violence interruption program in Eckington, which is funded through the Office of the Attorney General’s Cure The Streets program. But she just received a promotion, and as of Friday, she’ll be working as a Program Manager with Father Factor Inc., another organization that works with Cure the Streets. She’ll lead up a new violence interruption effort in Sursum Corda, the neighborhood where she grew up, and nearby Ivy City.

Green said she entered this work because in the past, she was involved in neighborhood conflicts.

“I was shot in a drive-by. I’ve been stabbed,” says Green. “I’ve also been the shooter. I’ve also been the stabber.”

But she says her six-month incarceration in 2006 changed her life. Her daughter was one year old at the time.

“That really opened my eyes,” said Green. “I didn’t want to put my daughter through that, and put my family through that anymore. That made me change my life.”

Having worked in violence intervention for the last four years, Green says she’s personally seen the people she mentors change their lives, too: She just hired two of her former participants to become violence intervention workers under her at the Sursum Corda site.

“I’m in this work to make things better,” she says. “I want to be the person to give you a chance.”

All of the instructors for the Peace Academy have been doing violence intervention work in the District for years, said Thompson-El.

Green says that matters – because often, training programs for violence intervention workers try to apply lessons from other cities to D.C., even though things here work differently.

“How can you tell me how to guide my community in the right direction if you’ve never been there? Most of the trainings I’ve been in, they’ve been related around gangs – and we don’t have gangs in D.C.,” says Green. Instead, she says, conflicts in D.C. often occur between less formally-organized neighborhood groups.

Green says she feels that the people leading the Peace Academy are locally trusted experts that she can learn from.

“They know the city, they know what happens, they know why the crimes are happening and the people who are doing the crimes,” she says.

The Honorary Dr. Majeed, who helps to lead several violence prevention efforts in the District, is helping to lead the effort and implement the Peace Academy curriculum along with Thompson-El.

“This is an official D.C. model. That is the beautiful thing about this curriculum,” he told the crowd at Busboys and Poets on Tuesday.

Majeed told DCist/WAMU that the curriculum will equip violence interruption workers with the skills to more effectively mediate neighborhood conflicts – but it will also help them identify what a career ladder looks like in this line of work. He says he wants violence interrupters to know that they don’t have to be doing frontline street outreach work for their entire career. They could go back to school to become a therapist, for example, or assume a leadership role in a non-profit organization, or in government.

Majeed also says he would like to see the Peace Academy partner with local universities so violence intervention workers could get course credit for their studies.

“That is definitely the goal – to make sure that as they put this time in, they will be recognized,” he said. One of the recommendations of a plan for reducing gun violence that the city recently commissioned and published was to do just that: to launch a training certificate program through a local university.

That plan also recommended that the city elevate and professionalize its violence intervention workforce by paying them higher salaries – at least $60,000 per year. (The average salary for a violence interrupter or outreach worker currently in D.C. is between $35,000 and $65,000, Office of Gun Violence Prevention Director Linda Harllee Harper told DCist/WAMU last month.)

Green told DCist/WAMU she has aspirations of continuing her schooling beyond the Peace Academy. She says she wants to study social work, to improve her interpersonal and communication skills and expand her career prospects.

But for the next 13 weeks, she’ll commit to her Peace Academy courses twice a week – in addition to her job as a Program Manager for Cure The Streets and two part-time bartending jobs she works to make ends meet.

Green says she often gets home from work at one or two a.m., then wakes up at 6:30 a.m. to take her young son to school. The demanding schedule is worth it, she says, because she sees progress in the neighborhoods where she works and she knows she’s helping people.

“Better pay would be good, but I don’t do it for the pay. I do it to help my community,” she adds. “Our city is amazing. D.C. is a great place once we get the violence down and get the people to join together.”