NEW ORLEANS — St. Anna’s Episcopal in New Orleans is known for its murder wall.
Every murder victim’s name is posted on a board in front of the church on Esplanade Avenue in Treme.
Father Bill Terry, the pastor at the church, says the violence is fueled by systemic racism and systemic economic inequality.
“The construct is a lack of opportunity, a lack of hope, a lack of a sense of personal worth, a sense of desperation,” Terry said.
Fr. Terry has watched the list on the board get longer in recent years.
His church community is now committed to disrupting that cycle of violence, hoping to prevent young people from becoming another name on the wall.
“We have to have programs that disrupt poverty, violence, ignorance,” Fr. Terry said.
That’s the purpose of Anna’s Place NOLA, an after-school program for at-risk kids in grades K-12 at the church.
The students come from homes where the parents are extremely poor and many of their neighbors are involved in a life of crime.
Volunteers pick them up from school and bring them to the church.
Program coordinator Darryl Durham says they spend 20 hours a week offering students a safe place to learn, tutoring and life skills training.
“When Father Bill and I designed this program12 years ago, we intentionally focused on younger kids because we were putting 11 and 12-year-old kids names up on the murder board,” Durham said.
Durham says despite the challenges at home, Anna’s Place students are changing their life’s trajectory.
“They leave us. They go to a broken school. They go to a broken home. They go to a broken community. Then they come back to us.”
Right now, 30 students are enrolled in Anna’s Place. The church is hoping to open a community center down the street and increase that number to 90.
“It is a culture of violence that can only be addressed in the long haul if we change that culture,” Father Terry said.
One hundred percent of Anna’s Place children have graduated from high school, and none have succumbed to violent crime according to Terry.
St Anna’s is making a difference one child at a time.