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
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