PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — As the city continues to grapple with record-breaking gun violence and more young lives being lost to bullets, Rickey Duncan's team is working toward solutions.
"I look like them, I come from them, and I want my experience to be their best teacher," Duncan said. "I want to do 'no entry' over 're-entry.'"
Since he left Graterford Prison in 2015, he’s been using his own life lessons to help kids, 12 years and older, fight adverse life circumstances.
"Being involved in the criminal justice system at one time, overcoming that and striving to get to the point that I am now, is a real experience for the kids to get to see, so I consider myself a role model," he said.
Duncan is executive director of the nonprofit NOMO Foundation, 925 N. Broad Street.
"It’s creating new options and more opportunities for youth that normally wouldn’t have it," he said.
Job readiness, trauma-informed care, food and clothing giveaways and recreational activities — he says they take a holistic approach to bettering young people’s futures and the future of the city.
"We have something we call 'Stay Stage Saturday,' where we take the kids away to an amusement park, out the state, out the city, just watching them be children, knowing they don’t have to babysit. They don’t have to cook. They don’t have to watch a bullet coming behind them. Just watching them be children. It means so much to us. That’s my pay. That’s my personal pay."
And he says, what they provide really does keep kids safer.
"One person that was in our program went to prison. And he went to prison during the pandemic because our doors wasn’t open. This was a kid that came here everyday."
Every week, NOMO serves more than 100 people, helping them reach new options and more opportunities. "It’s liberating," Duncan says.
"The special sauce is love. It’s showing that you care, putting the time in with them."