The Gun Violence Project & The Center To Prevent Youth Violence
In 1994, Cooley founded The Gun Violence Project, a non-profit organization with the mission to reposition the gun violence issue as an urgent matter of public health (32,000 Americans killed every year, including over 3,000 children) rather than the seemingly intractable political wedge issue it had become. In 1996, The Gun Violence Project, in collaboration with The Creative Coalition, created its first campaign (voice-over by Alec Baldwin), which focused on the dangers of kids taking their parents' guns to school. In 1997, The Gun Violence Project merged into a new organization called PAX, founded by Cooley and Daniel Gross, an advertising executive whose brother Matthew was wounded in the shooting atop the Empire State Building in early 1997.
By 2002, The Center to Prevent Youth Violence had became the largest non-lobbying organization working on the gun violence issue as a result of the success and rapid expansion of the ASK and SPEAK UP campaigns. In 2011, PAX officially changed its name to The Center to Prevent Youth Violence to better reflect the youth and family focus of its prevention driven campaigns.
Cooley resigned as co-CEO of The Center to Prevent Youth Violence in 2004 but remained on the organization's Board of Trustees until its merger with the Brady Center in 2012.
Read more about this topic: Talmage Cooley
Famous quotes containing the words gun, violence, project, center, prevent and/or youth:
“I’d like to say I didn’t intend to kill her. But when you have a gun ... you always intend ... when you have to.”
—Ketti Frings (1915–1981)
“The art of living is to function in society without doing violence to one’s own needs or to the needs of others. The art of mothering is to teach the art of living to children.”
—Elaine Heffner (20th century)
“... one of art photography’s most vigorous enterprises—[is] concentrating on victims, on the unfortunate—but without the compassionate purpose that such a project is expected to serve.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“Everything that explains the world has in fact explained a world that does not exist, a world in which men are at the center of the human enterprise and women are at the margin “helping” them. Such a world does not exist—never has.”
—Gerda Lerner (b. 1920)
“The United States have a coffle of four millions of slaves. They are determined to keep them in this condition; and Massachusetts is one of the confederated overseers to prevent their escape.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Manhood like a lawyer with his formulas
Sesamés his youth for innocent acquittal.”
—Allen Tate (1899–1979)