Mar’Yum Patterson and Sarah Sweeney first met in a doctor’s office — Sweeney’s.
At the time, Patterson was hunting for a female family physician who would really listen to her health concerns. For example, why did Patterson have high blood pressure even though it didn’t run in her family? Sweeney, who worked at the time at a MetroHealth clinic in Glenville, searched for the answer and found it. The cuff taking Patterson’s blood pressure didn’t fit. Patterson didn’t have high blood pressure in the first place.
The relationship didn’t stop there. Every time Patterson had an appointment, the two started talking and didn’t stop. Sweeney noticed Patterson’s Harley-Davidson branded clothing. Patterson told her all about her long motorcycle rides. Sweeney wanted to know more about Patterson’s job as a violence interrupter at a local trauma center. Patterson told her about her nights discouraging retaliation after a patient gets violently injured.
Over time, the conversations kept returning to one topic: “Every time I went to see her, we would start talking about gun violence,” said Patterson, who worked at the time for a community violence intervention group called the Cleveland Peacemakers Alliance. Patterson saw people survive gunshot wounds but flounder financially afterwards since they couldn’t work.
Sweeney saw the residue of gun violence show up in her patients at the clinic, too. One had a spinal cord injury as a result of a shooting, making it tough to get healthcare and go back to work. Another lost the father of her kids and had to start working two jobs as a result. Often, patients’ health spiraled after a gunshot injury or death of a loved one.
“I had a patient whose son was murdered, and I saw how she isolated herself, and she didn’t come into the clinic, and her diabetes got out of control,” Sweeney said.
Patterson and Sweeney’s conversation took a different tack. What if the two could work together to find ways to better support survivors and their families?
Thus began a partnership that transcended the walls of traditional institutions like hospitals and universities: the Centering Survivors and Families Research Collaborative — Cleveland. It includes Sweeney, Patterson, people personally impacted by gun violence, trauma surgeons and more. Together, their goal is to do more research about firearm harms and injury in Cleveland while ensuring gun violence survivors and their families participate in the process and benefit from the outcomes.
The group has been working together since 2022. Now, it’s publishing some of their first projects: concrete data to better understand the experiences and needs of survivors and family members who lived through a shooting.
The point, Sweeney said, is to help answer the question: “How do we heal after that new normal? After you’ve lost someone, after you’ve been injured, what does it really look like for people to thrive again or communities to thrive again after we’ve had an injury or death?”
Without evidence, it’s difficult to answer that question, Sweeney said. Research could help narrow in on the most effective solutions and interventions — helping make the case for more funding, changed clinical practices or different laws.
Partnership creates quote book to highlight survivors’, family’s voices
After Sweeney and Patterson’s conversations took off, Sweeney applied for and received a grant from MetroHealth’s Population Health Research Institute. It helped the growing group — which now included the Cleveland Peacemakers Alliance, MetroHealth’s trauma recovery center and anti-violence community leaders like Michelle Bell — pay for their first project.
The group’s first objective: sit down for deep conversations to better understand the experiences and needs of residents after they or someone they love has been injured or killed by gun violence.
The team identified 21 people with personal experience of gun violence, from surviving an injury to losing a loved one. Many made up more than one category. The wide-ranging interviews asked residents about what they wish medical and mental health providers understood, what programs they wish they could create for people going through similar experiences, and how gun violence impacted finances, employment and housing.
Patterson asked Kimberley King to join as the first interview. King’s son Kevin was killed in a home invasion in 2019. She and Patterson are close friends – practically family – and Kevin’s death devastated both of them. The interview process turned out to be “therapeutic,” King said.
“Sharing my story, it’s one way that I keep his memory alive,” King said. She still works closely with the collaborative, traveling with them to conferences to present research.
The team transcribed and anonymized all 21 interviews, then published them online. The 115-page quote book is available to anyone interested in better understanding survivor and family members’ experiences.
“It is our hope that the voices of people impacted by gun violence can bring some healing to others who are impacted,” the collaborative wrote in the book’s introduction. “It is also our hope that other people will use these quotations in their own work to advocate and provide support for families and survivors.”
Researchers can also use the information to see what themes repeat. Shanell Harris, a social worker who leads MetroHealth’s trauma recovery center, led the interviews. She said she often heard that individuals needed services six months to a year after the crisis. That was the case with mental health services specifically.
“Therapy is needed, but individuals may not be ready for that right after,” Harris shared at an event for crime victims in April, where she and Sweeney spoke.
Other themes included:
- Families and survivors need emotional support that is easily accessible and continues over time
- Physical reminders and memorials play a role in both community healing and trauma
- Financial impacts are common and make healing more difficult
What do gun violence survivors and family members’ need?
By 2024, the research was in full swing. And it was time for step two. The team got funding to survey 267 adults in the Cleveland area about what they needed after interpersonal violence, including gunshot wounds, stabbings or assault. The surveyed residents either lived through such violence or were a family member of someone who did.
The work started out focusing on medical services after patients are discharged from the hospital, said Dr. Vanessa Ho, a trauma surgeon at MetroHealth who worked on the research. But after speaking with team members who lived through violence, they decided to ask about more than healthcare. Access to food, transportation, housing and other basic necessities were just as important.
Sure enough, survivors ranked money for housing, rent and utilities at the top of the list in terms of important needs. Nearly half said they got little to no help with those services, the survey found.
The data can help Cleveland’s institutions understand what gun violence survivors and their family members need after a tragedy, said Myesha Watkins, the former executive director of Cleveland Peacemakers and current administrator of the Cuyahoga County Office of Violence Prevention. She assisted with developing and distributing the survey.
“What happens is that it heightened the challenges that already existed, right?” Watkins said. “Like utilities and housing and food, all of that stuff was already there before someone got shot. And so it shows that gun violence isn’t an isolated issue.”
Nine in ten respondents also ranked mental health support later-on — as opposed to immediately after the violence — as highly important. About 37% of respondents didn’t get that help.
Like the quote book, the collaborative published all the data online.
Research team creating map to determine how to decrease gun violence
The team is now working with Case Western Reserve researchers and MetroHealth doctors to develop a tool showing the complexity of gun violence prevention and intervention. It’s a free-wheeling map that connects a wide range of factors — like income levels, mental healthcare access and employment rates — back to violence.
The hope, Ho said, is to be able to show how different leverage points could improve or worsen gun violence. Right now, the map is largely conceptual. For example, an arrow pointing from firearm accessibility to gun violence incidents indicates that one raises the other. But Ho and the team are seeking research funding to put numbers behind the relationships. That would allow the model to mathematically predict how one intervention — say, investing in safe gun storage — would decrease gun violence.
“There are a lot of ways you could potentially try to reduce gun violence, and we only have so many limited resources,” Ho said. “So having a mathematical model would potentially help us understand where funding could be most effective.”
Even without those numbers, the map is helpful for community advocates like Bell. She visited Washington, D.C., last week to advocate for stronger gun safety laws and more funding for anti-violence organizations. She brought the map along to show the legislative aides how they could make a difference in decreasing gun violence.
“We say it all the time: It’s like, ‘Yeah, everybody knows. It’s going to take all of us. It’s gonna take a village,’” Bell said. “But here’s a pictorial of that, or illustration, that shows you.”
