The crusaders

Michael Dye and Justin Harris arrived at Stroger Hospital before the ambulance carrying their friend did.

Just after 11 p.m. May 7, Dye came upon the Grand Green Line station and heard shots ring out. His friend, Kevin Ambrose, had been shot in the back. Dye rushed to his side as Ambrose collapsed in an alley.

"I could see him lying there," Dye said. "He was still alive when I got down there, but you could see the pain in his eyes."

Dye said he has trouble recalling the emotions of the evening, but fear, shock, anger and sadness all took their turns after Ambrose-a 19-year-old theater student who lived just minutes from the Green Line stop in Grand Boulevard-was pronounced dead later that night.

It stuck with Dye, 19, of South Shore and Harris, 19, of Greater Grand Crossing, that it took so long for for an ambulance to arrive at Stroger Hospital. The pair and friend Zan Adams, 18, of Bronzeville, wonder whether Ambrose could have been saved if the South Side had another trauma center that could handle gunshot wounds. (A spokesperson for Stroger Hospital said the hospital cannot comment on specific cases, but that it is not in control of ambulance response times and is fully equipped to handle any trauma case that comes through its doors.)

After the shooting, Dye, Harris and Adams co-founded RISEChicago, a grassroots organization that aims to bring another trauma center to the South Side and call attention to the rising toll of homicides in Chicago. Next year, they plan to place orange markers in each Chicago neighborhood, tallying the number of killings in each area.

"This is happening all around us, all the time," Adams said. "People read about people getting killed. But if you could see, all at one time, all the murders, it would have an effect on people's minds and psyche."

RISE exists in a complex ecosystem of groups large and small, official and unofficial, working to combat violence in Chicago. With shoestring budgets and small staffs, such organizations are underdogs facing the daily toll of violence in the city. These organizations, by their nature, are difficult to quantify, and many organizations working for similar causes simply don't know all the others that exist.

Rebecca Levin is looking to change that.

"It's something we're struggling with mightily," Levin, the director of Strengthening Chicago's Youth (SCY), a program aimed at connecting small anti-violence organizations. As the liaison to community organizations throughout Chicago, Levin has a list of more than 400 individuals in 160 organizations, a list that's hardly comprehensive when it comes to tallying all anti-violence efforts. The program is a part of the Anne and Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital.

"All of these small organizations working together is what's really going to move the dial," she said. The challenge is that there is no central governing body, registry or database for these organizations. Some choose to register as nonprofit organizations, but it's not something that happens overnight, she says.

Levin cites the after-school program Kids off the Block as an example. It began in 2003 with one woman opening her home to students in Roseland after school in hopes of keeping them off the street. Now, the program has aided more than 1,500 youths with after-school programs and has won national recognition.

Though they may fly under the radar, being the underdog can have its advantages. The Resident Association of Greater Englewood (RAGE) works to serve a part of Englewood that often gets overlooked by other groups: the working- and middle-class families in the neighborhood. Formed in 2010, RAGE is not designated as a nonprofit, and it does not seek funding through grant programs offered by the city and state. The group's founder, Asiaha Butler, said she would prefer to keep it that way.

"A lot of these [larger] groups get pigeonholed; they get away from the real reason they are doing the work," she said. "We want to say whatever we want to say, call out an alderman, be independent enough to do what we want to do. Sometimes it's a hindrance and sometimes it is an advantage."

Butler said not being restrained by official designations or the regulations of grant money helps the group maintain its mission.

"No one focuses on the residents that aren't poor and uneducated," she said. "It's something I call the Englewood victim syndrome. Since so many bad things happen in the community, people think these things are normal, they are going to happen. [RAGE] definitely doesn't feel like bad things are supposed to happen to us."

Facing mounting violence in Chicago with a minimal budget does take its toll on some organizations. With a group of about 10 volunteers, Speaking Publicly Eliminates Another Killing (SPEAK), aims to go global with its message of speaking out against violence and breaking pre-established beliefs about "snitching" when violence occurs. But funding is what Keisha Willis says has sometimes hindered the efforts of her organization. She's run domestic, gang and bullying violence workshops in 10 Chicago-area schools since 2011, but applications for grants and donations are hard to come by, with more established organizations instead getting the money.

"I have so many ideas, my imagination is so huge, that funding is the issue," she said. "There are so many people out there vying for the same piece of pie. But give me a slice, and I will make sure we have more pie."

RISEChicago said it will keep pushing for the South Side trauma center, despite setbacks.

"When it comes to power and pull, we don't have that," Adams said. "What we do have is the power of people. Everyone in Chicago knows somebody that's been affected by gun violence. That's not good. They have the money and the power; we have the power of people. We're underdogs for now, but eventually we will have so many people they can't turn us away."

mswasko@tribune.com