Erica Ford.Photo: Carlo Allegri/Reuters
Delano Martin paced back and forth in his Queens, N.Y., bedroom, filled with sadness and rage.
It was August 2019 and three of his close friends had been shot and killed just hours earlier.
While Martin debated his next steps, his mother let him know someone had come to talk to him.
He looked out of the window and saw a tall, lanky woman with a shock of gray hair standing in front of a big orange bus parked just outside. But he refused to come down.
“We told his mother we were going to sit in front until he came out,” recalls Erica Ford, the woman standing in front of the 35-foot bus she calls the Peacemobile.
Leaning up against the bus, she told Martin’s mother to tell him she and her team from her non-profitLIFE Camp Inc.,(Love Ignites Freedom Through Education) would wait for him.
“We weren’t going anywhere,” says Ford, now 57.
Being there to help teens, young adults and others when a split-second decision could potentially upend one life and end another is what has made Ford a widely respected community leader from the streets of New York City all the way to the White House.
“I’m the Peace Lady,” she tells PEOPLE. “Everybody knows the Peace Lady.”
She founded LIFE Camp in 2002 to help diffuse explosive situations that often lead to violence or retaliation — and show them how to change their lives and realize their dreams.
Thanks to Ford, Martin, now 33, underwent a life-changing transformation that fateful August day that even he still cannot believe.
Seeing that Ford wasn’t going to leave, Martin eventually came outside where he met Ford and LIFE Camp Assistant Director Kheperah Kearse, who invited him onto the bus — a fully decked-out RV.
Once inside, he couldn’t help but relax. The lights were dimmed, and the scent of lavender aromatherapy floated in the air.
Over the next three hours, Ford and Kearse helped him work through the intense anger and underlying emotional pain he was feeling with deep breathing, screaming in a sound booth and talking to a professional therapist.
“We were making sure that the idea of retaliation wasn’t something that he was thinking of,” says Ford.
It worked.
“I was able to just close my eyes and just let everything out,” says Martin.
“I feel like if she didn’t do that at that moment to the extent that she did, I wouldn’t even be talking to you right now,” he says. “I’d probably be in jail or dead.”
A Legacy of Peace
Ford has been working for decades with young people, helping them to avoid gun violence and giving them tools to lead successful lives.
“Alot of the people I grew up with in southeast Queens were killed in the crack epidemic or sent to jail for 30 years,” she says. “I saw the impact that their deaths or incarcerations had on their children and I wanted to break that cycle.”
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When Ford and her team hear about a shooting that’s about to erupt or one that has just taken place in her home neighborhood of Jamaica, Queens, they race to the scene and fan out onto the streets to find out what happened. Then, they calm people down and help them peacefully resolve their issues.
“We go in the front of the situation and help people heal and transform so that they don’t use a gun as a tool to resolve their trauma,” she says. “We help them mediate their own situation.”
LIFE Camp provides counseling from “credible messengers” who’ve turned their own lives around and whose advice people will more likely heed.
It also provides classes in financial literacy, wealth building and technology to help young people avoid “the school-to-prison pipeline,” as Ford calls it.
Part of LIFE Camp includes LIFEstyle program, featuring the “Urban Yogis” — yoga classes for youth in public housing — and classes in wellness and nutrition.
“We show up in a community to prevent violence,” says Kearse. “That might look like hosting a community event and bringing wellness programming to them and teaching people breathing exercises and how to self-regulate.
All of this empowers young people to lead successful lives.
“Everybody has the right to be who they want to be and allow their greatness to shine,” says Ford.
Still Making a Difference
“I never knew rallies,” she says. “I never knew anything besides hanging out, going to the clubs,” she says. “It changed my view of the world — that we don’t have to live in this cycle of violence that’s impacting our children and our community.”
The late rapper Tupac Shakur had a big impact on her, she says. “A lot of people often forget that Tupac wanted to work with those young people that everybody forgot about,” she says. “That’s what we’re doing now.”
The Code Foundation “tried to make the young people who promoted peace the cool guys and gals in the community,” says Ford.
Ford’s work is known nationally, too. She was among the advocates from around the country who were invited to the White House in July 2022 to celebrate the passage of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act to reduce gun violence, which includes funding for community-based violence prevention programs like LIFE Camp.
“To have the president recognize our work is something that words can’t describe,” she said in a video on her LIFE Camp site.
Over the years, Ford has helped many young people realize their dreams.
“One of the young ladies who used to be my assistant now works in the management company withThe Weeknd,” she says.
“She is doing a lot of phenomenal work in the industry because of a lot of the discipline and tools that we gave her.”
And Martin, the young man she talked down from his anger in 2019, is thriving as well.
“I didn’t really have many dreams before I met Miss Ford,” says Martin, who went on to work for LIFE Camp and help transform other young people’s lives.
“She applied a lot of pressure in helping me structure my life, expand my education and the dreams that I had. To me, she is definitely a superhero. She doesn’t ever give up on people.”
source: people.com
