NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WKRN) — Over the past three weeks, teens have been at the center of many conversations. The city mourned the loss of several juveniles who fell victim to gun violence.

The latest shooting happened at a Madison park. Witnesses at the scene told officers there was a group of six minors in the park and two of them shot at each other. However, the teen who was shot was not at the scene when officers arrived.

Investigators believed the victim got into a gold-colored car and left. Officers found the car and got behind it as it was approaching TriStar Skyline Medical Center.

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This isn’t the first time a teen fight has turned into a shots fired call for the Metro Nashville Police Department (MNPD). In May, a teen fight also sparked a shooting that left a 13-year-old dead at a Bellevue park.

“Tonight we mourn the loss of another teenager to gun violence — this time in Madison,” a statement from Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell read. “I am grateful to our first responders, Parks staff, and witnesses who assisted the victim and kept others safe. There’s no one answer, but we have many partners committed to improving safety for our young people.”

The reality of what is happening in the city is something Mike Floss said that he addresses daily.

“I graduated from Pearl Cohn High School. I’m from Nashville, Tennessee. I’ve been here my whole life, and I think a really important part is what happens during those really critical development stages, that 13 to 24, 25, 26,” Floss said the Arts & Culture Director, Southern Movement Committee. “If you really get the investment at the city level right and we develop this thing out, we could see something totally new in Nashville.”

Floss, along with the Southern Movement Committee, has been working with Nashville’s youth to help them not only feel safe, but comfortable in their own communities. However, with recent headlines showing the dark, violent side of Nashville, it’s hard to not see the problems.

“The Southern Movement Committee is a democracy building, youth organizing, and community organizing organization focusing on TN, so right now our base is in Nashville. We organize young people around the end of the school-to-prison pipeline and really foster safe and healthy communities and so they have been leading our Varisty Spending Plan, and we also do quite a bit of work around voter engagement and political engagement,” explained Erica Perry, the executive director of the Southern Movement Committee

“Throughout the whole course of the Varsity Spending Plan campaign, we’ve been constantly getting the news updates about teen shootings, folks dying as a result of gunshot wounds, and even prior to that, those were happening. It seems to escalate every year. We know there’s going to be an uptick around the summertime when folks are out of school, when there is less programming and places for people to go, and when those skills have not been developed to have conflict resolution and restorative practices at an early age,” said Floss.

However, after numerous shootings involving Nashville’s youth, the Southern Movement Committee asked: what is being done to solve the problem? To find the answers, they went to the direct source.

“We saw that young people really needed a space to define safety for themselves, in their schools, in their community and in their neighborhoods. Young people, over the last two years, have been defining safety and really talking about what keeps them safe. Now we’re putting dollars to what that vision is,” Perry said. “We really, really want to make sure that we are getting to the root causes of harm and the root causes of gun violence so that our people can be safe. So that young people can go back to school with their classmates and not be missing a classmate because of gun violence. right. It’s possible for them to be healthy, to be safe, to have thriving lives, but we have to invest the resources into it.”

It’s part of the Varsity Spending Plan, and it is part of the city’s proposed operating budget. The $10 million investment into Nashville’s youth showed positive support from teens, many of whom spoke before the Metro Council.

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“One of the things that I felt was so powerful was for them to be able to channel what can sometimes be grief and hurt into clear policy demands. It’s a clear budgetary demand and really clear program. They have an assessment of what restorative justice is and what it could be,” said Perry.

The money would be split into three main parts:

• Increasing Community Center Programming

• Creating an Office of Youth Safety: would be responsible for piloting an alternative to jails and police to address gun violence

• Implement a Restorative Justice Program in local high schools

“These are real families, these are real stories, these are real experiences and real pain. A lot of emotion and hurt have driven our teenage youth into a place where we going to have to speak up and say something because we’re just not getting what we need,” Floss explained.

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