Philly teens create gun violence PSAs for pitch contest

Several teams of Philadelphia teenagers gave presentations Monday and shared videos they produced about the danger of guns as part of a pitch competition.

The winning submission – created by a group from Youth Empowerment for Advancement Hangout, known as YEAH Philly – will be incorporated into a nationwide social media campaign, organizers said.

All of the teams included young people who have lost relatives in a shooting.

“Anytime I want to go to a basketball court, I have fear in the back of my mind that, ‘Oh, I may be shot this day,’” Zarway Kar, 15, of West Philadelphia, said while showing a comic he made about a simple argument escalating to gunfire.

YEAH Philly, which also co-hosted the event, presented a series of harrowing public service announcement-style clips that were screened in front of a crowd gathered at REC Philly, a studio space in the Fashion District mall.

One video shows a Fourth of July cookout, with the names and ages of the children and adults in attendance popping up on screen. Meanwhile, the sound of a pounding heart accompanies a young man in a car as his shaky hand grips a gun.

Another depicts a young girl tossing and turning in bed, interspersed with local news coverage of shootings targeting teens.

“All this stuff you see, it impacts you,” said Presley Barner, 18, a YEAH Philly team member. “It follows you to your sleep.”

Barner also read a piece she wrote about her older cousin Kahlief Myrick, who, at age 16, was fatally shot outside a Southwest Philadelphia 7-Eleven in 2021.

“Very powerful, very moving,” Norristown Police Chief Jacqueline Bailey-Davis remarked after the screening. “I’m just choked up right now.”

Bailey-Davis was one of six judges who scored the projects. Others on the panel included Pilar Ocampo, injury prevention manager for the city’s Department of Public Health, and Kaheem Bailey-Taylor, of the School District of Philadelphia’s youth violence reduction program.

Each team received $2,500 in compensation for their work on the videos, and YEAH Philly’s victory earned them an additional $2,500.

Competition co-host Project Unloaded plans to incorporate the winning pitch into their national “Guns Change the Story” marketing campaign. The organization was founded to counter the perception that gun ownership makes young people safer.

Unity in the Community, a South Philadelphia-based nonprofit, produced a video for the contest that prominently featured teens whose fathers had been killed in shootings.

“It was to show the effects,” Khamir Blackson, 16, explained during a question-and-answer session with the judges.

Presenters also included groups affiliated with Julia R. Masterman High School and the Children Hospital of Philadelphia’s Building Resilience After Violent Experiences (BRAVE) program.

“This takes a lot of vulnerability and courage to come up here and show this presentation,” judge Tyler Wood, a staffer in City Councilmember Jamie Gauthier’s office, told the Unity in the Community team.