Daniel Hunt Dreams Of A Peaceful City

As a part-time student support worker at Engineering & Science University Magnet School (ESUMS), Daniel Hunt always kept his eye on one high-schooler.The student had been hanging out with gang members, and gotten arrested. Hunt pulled the teen aside to let him know it still wasn’t too late to turn things around.

“People are watching you,” Hunt said. ​“Everywhere you go, someone is watching you.”

The message got through. Hunt brought New Haven’s then-police chief, Anthony Campbell, on a tour of the school and made sure to introduce the student. The teen made it to graduation and now aspires to be a cop.

Hunt was once on the other end of that advice, knowing someone out there saw him: The directors of a summer-school program that he was nearly kicked out of ended up inspiring him to reach other kids.

This past November, Hunt received a proclamation from Mayor Toni Harp saluting his volunteerism and commitment to New Haven. He chose to have the ceremony at the Connecticut Center for Arts & Technology (ConnCAT), the arts education and worker retraining non-profit, which he said had been a ​“special place” for him.

In 2011, Hunt’s cousin, Marquell Banks, was murdered in the West River neighborhood with a shotgun bullet to the head. Both Hunt and Banks were just 13 years old at the time.

“I felt like I was going to go down the wrong path,” Hunt said. ​“It kind of broke me apart, because I was close to him. It was a rough time going through that, being young myself and having to endure that.”

A year later, Erik Clemons, ConnCAT’s founding executive director, got a call from New Haven Reads about Hunt. They said Hunt, then an eighth-grader, had ​“a lot of potential and promise,” if he could just get through the barriers in his way.

Clemons, who himself had lost a younger brother to gun violence in a Norwalk housing project back in 1988, asked Hunt to join ConnCAT’s brand-new summer arts program for middle-schoolers, focused on the Harlem Renaissance as ​“this idea of community building off the heels of slavery,” Clemons explained.

The group learned about the Great Migration northward. They read Countee Cullen’s poems and Marcus Garvey’s speeches. And they went to the Apollo Theater, where they danced on the same stage that had hosted Billie Holiday, Diana Ross, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder and so many more stars.

“We wanted to introduce them to Black history, to a rich culture that they’re not learning in school,” Clemons said.

But Hunt had outbursts, becoming so disruptive that teachers kicked him out of class. Just like Hunt would later do at ESUMS, Clemons sat him down to talk, telling him about ConnCAT’s expectations and asking who he wanted to be. He shared what he’d learned from his own grief, that ​“the more I help others, the more I’m helping myself.”

Hunt straightened up. At the end of the program, he handed Clemons a short, one-page essay he’d written about the city’s violence.

“There’s a lot of trouble with teens with guns and gangs in today’s society,” it began. Hunt proceeded to describe the safer city he wanted to see, where parents talked to their kids about ​“the dangers of staying out all night long,” and teenagers volunteered their time to help ​“the people who don’t have the things we have.”

Hunt now holds down three jobs, as he tries to make that vision real.

He spends mornings in student support services in the city’s schools. Over the last four years, at ESUMS, he set up a mentorship program that paired middle and high schoolers, and he’s now planning to bring a similar program at East Rock Community Magnet School.

And he spends afternoons at ConnCAT, as a youth worker assistant, where kids hang on to his arm, inseparable from him.

“I’m back here, working with the young people and giving them the knowledge and the wisdom that I have,” Hunt said. ​“Being in this program, I want to help them motivate and build up into young leaders, like myself or Mr. Clemons.”

Between a weekend job at the YMCA and his volunteer hours with Jessie’s Homeless Outreach Projects, the Police Explorer’s Program and his church, Hunt has also organized rounds of community walks with the police department.

In 2017, after 14-year-old Tyrick Keyes was killed, Hunt took cops on tour of New Haven’s neighborhoods. He said the goal is to get police out on the streets, engaging residents, in the hopes of changing perceptions of the department.

They started off in Newhallville, then went to Hunt’s Hill South neighborhood. They’ve since gone to Dwight and Kensington, Fair Haven, Dixwell and Downtown.

The page Hunt wrote seven years ago still hangs in Clemons’ office, like a mission statement for the organization.

Asked why he keeps it up, Clemons said the essay is ​“a reminder of what’s important in this world.” He said it’s essential to remember that, ​“not only to yourself and your values, but to the generations behind you” — Clemons pointed to Hunt, who sat across the table from him, wet-eyed, almost in the exact same spot where they first leveled with each other seven years ago — ​“and now behind you.”

“That’s why we exist, to ensure that young people have a better quality of life than we have,” Clemons added. ​“This young man was dreaming of that world, and now he’s creating it.”