Chicago teens riff on 'Love Island,' 'aura' trend to pitch campaigns pushing peers to put down guns

Dozens of nervous teens packed a downtown conference room this week to pitch a panel of city officials and civic leaders on social media campaigns they’ve spent the summer developing.

The messaging of their campaigns was the same: get teens to put down their guns.

But they took different approaches.

One team riffed on the slang term “aura,” used by members of Generation Alpha to describe someone’s vibe, as a way to convince their peers that there’s nothing cool about guns.

Other teams borrowed from the popular reality dating show “Love Island” to present skits in which “islanders” voted out participants who owned guns.

But it was a campaign called T.R.A.P. that emerged victorious on Thursday. It urged teens not to fall for the trap of believing that they’d be safer with a gun, citing research that shows firearm owners are more likely to get shot.

One of their “spring cleaning” skits depicted teens cleaning out their rooms at the behest of their parents, tossing out everything from old clothes to guns.

Judge Cherie Animashaun, founder of the Her Rising Initiative, said she circled the T.R.A.P. team’s name in her notebook as soon as they took to the podium.

Cherie Animashaun, founder of Her Rising Initiative, speaks during the Project Unloaded event Thursday in the Loop.

Anthony Vazquez/Sun-Times

“The notion of, ‘Hey, don't fall into that trap,’ that's something I've been telling my younger brother who's Black,” said Animashaun. “That's something I've been raised to hear. So for them to use something that I think our community has heard time and time again, but to reclaim it, it's just so cool.”

A six-week summer program organized by the nonprofit Project Unloaded recruits teens from the South and West sides of the city, many of whom have seen the toll of gun violence up close.

Luis Delgado, a member of the T.R.A.P. team, said he almost lost one of his relatives to gun violence several years back.

“Thank the Lord that they ended up surviving it, but it was such a scary moment,” the 17-year-old recalled. “We didn’t know if they were going to live or not, and that just sparked something in our family that we wanted to get guns away from the household.”

During the program, Delgado and other teens got a crash course in how to develop a social media campaign from scratch.

They met with advertising experts who helped them shape their ideas. They produced their own reels and skits. And they even developed prototypes of merchandise for their campaigns, from t-shirts to travel mugs and totebags.

Though the program was paid, Delgado said, “I could care less about the money. It was more about making an impact in my community.”

Delgado said he talked about the T.R.A.P. campaign with his friends, sharing the videos his team filmed and the gun violence facts they learned throughout the program. He was so convincing that he managed to get two of his friends to get rid of their guns.

Team T.R.A.P. presents its campaign Thursday at the Project Unloaded event.

Anthony Vazquez/Sun-Times

“All throughout the South and West [sides] of Chicago, people believe that having a gun makes you safer,” he said. “‘And I told them, ‘Let's be real about where we [are] at right now. Were the friends we lost to gun violence safer with a gun?’”

“It didn't just take me one day. It took a week, a week and a half to talk with them … to annoy them basically with the facts, statistics, and show them that you can let go of guns because no one's gonna judge you. By letting go of a gun, you are showing courage that a lot of people sometimes just don't have.”

Kamari Markiyah Brown, from Lawndale, said she was set on buying her own gun before she joined Project Unloaded.

“I felt unsafe, especially with what's happening to young Black teens like myself,” she said.

She changed her mind after she learned through the program that having a gun at home increases the risk of suicide.

“Now that I know that,” she said, "I do not want anything to do with a gun.”

Brown said the program has changed how she perceives her neighborhood and the world around her.

“I knew the world was unsafe, but I didn't realize it was to this extent,” she said. “But I also didn't realize how much effect I could have on my peers.”

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