James Rodriguez walked out of federal prison in 2025 with no life plan. He’d spent three years of a 42 month RICO sentence for dealing drugs, and had no new place to live, no job, and no educational prospects. A gang member in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston since he was a young teen, Rodriguez went back home, back to where he’d gotten in trouble in the first place. He knew he couldn’t go back to the hustle if he wanted to stay out of prison — where, he said, he felt like a “total loser” — and that he wanted a different life. But he didn’t know how that different life would even be possible.
“A couple months out, my probation officer was asking me about getting a job,” Rodriguez says, “but I didn’t even have $20 to get my GED certificate printed and sent to me. Everything was set up for me to go back to jail. How else am I to support a kid?”
But then something unexpected happened: A couple of younger guys in the neighborhood invited Rodriguez to tag along to a session at an organization called Uncornered where they promised — at the very least — that he’d get fed. There, Rodriguez got much more than just a hot meal.
“Unless you get to these most violent guys, you won’t get to zero. And unless you get to zero, the violence will come back.” — Mark Culliton, Uncornered
The day he first walked into Uncornered, he found guys like him sitting in a circle, sharing their feelings, their fears and frustrations, and hopes. It was unlike anything the lifelong gang member had experienced. “I remember as a kid, no one wanted to go to therapy or speak out about what’s going on with us, because we’d get made fun of,” Rodriguez says. Now, he was listening as a man from a different neighborhood who’d beaten a homicide rap was opening up about his life. “I’m like, Jesus Christ,” Rodriguez recalls. “What is this?”
This was Uncornered, a 10-year-old gun violence prevention organization with a seemingly outlandish goal that makes it different from other such programs: zero homicides. Not lowering the number of gun murders each year, as we’ve consistently done in Philadelphia over the last couple years, but eliminating them altogether by recruiting men like Rodriguez to model change for other men in their communities.
“Unless you get to these most violent guys, you won’t get to zero,” says Mark Culliton, Uncornered co-founder. “And unless you get to zero, the violence will come back.”
“Struggling every day just to survive”
Culliton and Michelle Caldeira didn’t set out to fix their city’s gun violence problem. In 2010, the two were working at Settlement House, which provides educational and social services to needy Bostonians, when they developed a theory of change: Giving educational opportunities to core — but highly disengaged — neighborhood influencers could transform communities, in part through example.
But there was one set of core influencers who consistently refused to participate: gang members. When Culliton and Caldeira asked them why, they got some version of the same response from everyone: We got a lot of shit going on. We can’t just drop everything and go to college. Are you crazy?
Culliton and Caldeira didn’t leave it there. They kept asking — on street corners and in jails — what it would take to get them to focus on school rather than selling drugs or whatever else they spent their time on. The number surprised them: $400 a week, or $20,000 a year — basically nothing. “People always think that people that are doing this stuff are making all this money, which is why they’re not focused on education or job opportunities or anything else,” says Danny Ramos, an Uncornered staff member in Kansas City. “The reality is, all the guys we work with are struggling every day just to survive.”
That insight ultimately led Culliton and Caldeira to launch Uncornered, first in Boston in 2016, then in Kansas City and Providence, recruiting the leaders with the most influence in the most violent gangs in the city, those whom other guys in the neighborhood are watching for cues about how to be a man who is respected and admired. Uncornered offers them $300 to $400 a week, paid biweekly as a regular paycheck, and asks for one main thing in return: conversation.
“We tell them: We’re not asking you to stop shooting, take off your mask, stop hanging out with those you love,” says Culliton. “We need you; you don’t need us. You’re the unique workforce that can take this momentum, that can take all this awesome work, and get from safest to zero. Please help us to understand how we end violence in Kansas City.”
Not demanding any kind of dramatic lifestyle change to participate is one of the things that sets Uncornered apart. Instead, that lifestyle change is how they leave the program. “Graduating” occurs in a couple ways: when a guy puts down his gun, ages out of the life, gets on a new path or, sometimes, goes to prison — though even then, they may wield enough influence that Uncornered keeps them on the payroll. As Culliton puts it: “If you’re not being watched by the most violent people in the city, you don’t have a place in our workforce.”
Several times a week, participants are invited to Uncornered’s offices for a healing circle like Rodriguez witnessed, or to unpack a violent incident that recently occurred, or to lay out the power structure of their gangs, and who is most at risk of shooting a gun, or to explain the pattern of violence to each other and Uncornered staff members. The hypothesis — because it is as yet a hypothesis — is that taking time to consider why and how shootings occur, to bear responsibility for subsequent generations, to start thinking about a different life will eventually lead them to put down their guns, and that those who look up to them will follow. It’s not so much mentoring as it is modeling.
“One guy decides to go back to school, and without fail, five guys are going to follow him. All of a sudden they’re sending different cues and messages, and it gives permission from the men we look up to and respect.” — Danny Ramos, Uncornered
First, though, they have to begin to imagine what that might look like. One of the first questions participants answer upon arrival at Uncornered is: What year do you think violence will end in your city? Most of them scoff at the idea — at first. But when pushed, they often do pick a far off date, like 2080. “That starts to become real,” Caldeira says. “The practice of belief, of building that muscle, is the start. If it’s not never, then what will it take?”
Culliton and Caldeira say the most important thing they ask of their participants is help in understanding the patterns of violence in their communities. That is a way to get gang members to think about their actions, to eventually consider a different way to respond to an affront that does not involve shooting guns. It’s also a way to help Uncornered expand on their own work, to find the guys they need to reach, and what they need to offer them to join the program.
Unlike other gun violence intervention efforts — including Philly’s version of focused deterrence — Uncornered intentionally does not partner with law enforcement. They also don’t directly offer social services, though in the course of understanding a participant, they may help untangle issues, like getting a driver’s license (making work and school more accessible) or a GED. Sometimes that one small thing can be the trigger for exploring a new opportunity — full-time work, relieving debt and child support, renewing relationships with children.
“You see it in bunches,” says Ramos. “One guy decides to go back to school, and without fail, five guys are going to follow him. All of a sudden they’re sending different cues and messages, and it gives permission from the men we look up to and respect.”
Really, zero deaths?
At The Citizen’s 2019 Ideas We Should Steal Festival, we showcased the work of David Muhammad, one of the architects of a radical drop in gun violence in Oakland, California. Afterwards, a group of civic leaders hired Muhammad to help them set up a similar program. The Civic Coalition to Save Lives helps coordinate intervention and prevention work in the city, which has led to a historic drop in homicides from a high of 562 in 2021 to 222 in 2025 (and going down again this year).
The first part of Muhammad’s work involved researching who exactly are Philly’s shooters — a small, identifiable cadre of (mostly) men who, if targeted with a carrot (social services) and stick (arrest) could be convinced to change their ways. The approach, among others, has been wildly successful, putting Philly at the top of U.S. cities to reduce gun violence post-Covid. Officials, while touting the success, invariably note that even one gun death is too many, not to mention the hundreds of shootings that don’t result in death.
But no one states as their goal zero deaths. The very notion seems absurd, given the number of guns in people’s hands, the amount of despair in some communities and the generational legacy of violence and imprisonment. But Caldeira is right that we can’t expect to eliminate gun violence if we don’t start to imagine a city that is free from shootings. In its hometown of Boston — granted, a much smaller and wealthier city than Philly — homicides fell to just 31 in 2025. That is a number so strikingly close to zero that Uncornered can plausibly see a near future when a year free of gun murders is achievable.
“Uncornered is bonafide prevention: The more we can stabilize people’s lives and show them a different way, the better.” — Melesa Johson, Jackson County prosecutor
Melesa Johnson, prosecutor in Kansas City’s Jackson County, acknowledges that many law enforcement officers dismiss the work of the nonprofit, believing it is their jobs to end gun violence. But Johnson is a realist who understands that the communities most impacted by crime, either as victims or as perpetrators, have complicated relationships with police and prosecutors. “I have to be honest about that,” says Johnson, the first Black woman to hold her position. “Some people do not trust the police or prosecutors, so to have an organization that can fill in those gaps, meet people where they are, leverage relationships to stop violence is helpful. Uncornered is bonafide prevention: The more we can stabilize people’s lives and show them a different way, the better.”
Over the last decade, Uncornered, which is almost entirely privately funded, has gone from three full-time staff members to 10, all directly connected to the communities they’re serving. They currently have 140 men on stipends, and 300 in their network among their three cities. A team of researchers from Notre Dame University is in the midst of studying the connection between Uncornered and violence reduction in particular hot spots and citywide. But Culliton says as long as the shootings go down, he doesn’t really care how that happens.
“We don’t know that this works — we think it does,” he says. “We’re hiring the most knowledgeable people to help us solve this. It seems like the whole way that America works: You hire specialists who are uniquely qualified to do jobs, and they get it done. So we’re hiring the most violent people to teach us how to end violence.”
In Boston, Rodriguez is still on Uncornered’s payroll — it was the first job he could claim to his probation officer — and has recently become a sheet metal worker apprentice, a union job. As an older member of the Uncornered crew, he watches over the younger guys, keeping them involved, teaching them by his own example. “A kid might be 16 or 22, looking up to me about how I dress, and he listens to me because I’m James,” Rodriguez says. “I testify about myself: You don’t want to be like me, and set an example for doing another thing.”
Still, until now Rodriguez has also been a full-fledged gang member, and is certain he would be killed if he goes around certain people. With Uncornered’s help, Rodriguez is working to extricate himself once and for all from that life, for his own sake and for the sake of those he feels a new responsibility to: those looking to him as an example.
“I don’t want to be a part of that anymore,” he says. “I’m part of Uncornered now. This is my purpose now, it’s my gang.”
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