00:02She was the person that you would want to be around. She was always very vibrant and bubbly,
00:06and I think that throughout our relationship a lot of things that I did do was just to learn
00:11from her. She was teaching me literally until like the day that she passed away.
00:26Idea and a couple of other friends were just hanging out in a nearby park that was about
00:30five minutes away from our high school. Two guys drove up in a car and one of them opened
00:38and fired on all of my friends.
01:00After the day, there was a lot of emotion. Me and about 15 other people were just like,
01:05we need to make a change. I think a lot of our bubbles were burst and we all realized
01:10that violence is very real and it's not something that we can ignore anymore. Like this is something
01:15we need to change. And it started off with like a discussion which like was really well
01:19received by a lot of community members and so so many people came out to just listen to
01:23us talk about what violence was to us. And that's when Project Orange Tree formed. A
01:29lot of people that were involved in that discussion, we just met up afterwards day after day trying
01:34to decide what we were going to do.
01:37The group of people who started off Project Orange Tree were very creative, diverse, like
01:42set of youth. Like we're all in high school. And I think it was Shawn who thought of the
01:48idea of orange. When people go hunting, they wear orange to basically show that they're not
01:54the target. And so we wanted to portray that we didn't want to be the next victim of Chicago
01:59violence. We didn't want to be the next target.
02:01And it's loud. Like the color is there. Like orange is something that you can't ignore.
02:06And we want it to be something that you couldn't ignore anymore.
02:12There's a lot of elements to why someone can, in the first place, think it's okay to pick
02:18up a gun. Felling school systems, institutionalized racism, food deserts. Like Chicago is known
02:26for the amount of food deserts we have. Everyone should wear orange on June 2nd and continue to
02:32wear orange. And so we can conquer this problem.
