3,752 lives have been lost to gun violence in Philadelphia since 2015. The Day of Hope is for those left behind.

There was free food, entertainment, live music, and early autumn sunshine — all the ingredients for a beautiful neighborhood festival.

Except this fair, EMIR Healing Center’s annual Philadelphia Day of Hope on Saturday, was a celebration of remembrance. That’s why many of the over 500 festivalgoers came to Martin Luther King Jr. High School’s parking lot carrying posters or wearing T-shirts that were handcrafted memorials to the lives and untimely deaths of loved ones.

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Wydia Becoat and her sister Tyesha Tyler made a poster of Becoat’s son who died in May and Tyler’s daughter who died in 2021. It was, Becoat said quietly, their effort to try to stop the gun violence.

According to the city controller’s Mapping Philadelphia Gun Violence database, 3,752 people have been victims of gun-related homicides since the department began keeping statistics in 2015. Chantay Love, cofounder and director of Every Murder Is Real (EMIR) Healing Center, said: “For every murder, 100 people are impacted. You can’t say once the trial over, it’s good. It’s a life journey with a pain that never goes away.”

Love, along with her mother, cofounded EMIR Healing Center in the wake of her own brother’s death in 1997. Emir Peter Greene was only 20 when he was shot seven times in the back by a drug dealer for whom he worked.

Love contends that no one should judge the victim of any violent death. Regardless of what the victims were doing or who they were, the death is a tragic loss for their relatives. The EMIR Healing Center, named for Emir Greene, has provided counseling and other services for the last 25 years to help families deal with lasting trauma.

The Day of Hope was designed to bring awareness of violence’s impact, but not to leave attendees in despair. The EMIR Healing Center has organized the Philadelphia Day of Hope since 2005, when it started as a local part of the National Day of Remembrance for Murder Victims. It has since evolved into an event to focus on finding joy amid tragedy.

“We did things a little differently this year,” Love said. “We created a section for health and wellness. We expanded wellness to include nature, and [we] planted pots for loved one to see as a new start. And we added sports activities. We had chair massages.”

Love said 50 partners joined to provide resources in real time. The EMIR Healing Center had its counselor there to provide on-the-spot counseling. And Scott Charles, trauma outreach manager at Temple University Hospital, was giving away gun locks and recruiting for a new program where residents could get a free gun case by taking a 90-minute workshop.

According to the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, increasing the number of secured weapons would reduce injuries, homicides, suicides, and mass shootings, but only about half of firearm owners practice responsible storage of their weapons, which means keeping the firearm unloaded and locked up.

Charles is adamant on one thing: For every minor who is shot, the fault lies with an adult who didn’t secure the firearm. That includes the shooting of Alaysia Smith, 13, who was killed Sept. 18 when a gun was mishandled by a group of teenagers. In the U.S., 23 minors are shot daily as of 2022, according to Brady, the nation’s oldest gun-violence prevention organization. To encourage residents to get free locks, Charles maintains a no-questions-asked policy.

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A murder story, like a birth story, begins with a date and a time.

For Yullio Robbins, it was Feb. 23, 2016, around noon. Her son James Walke III was 28 when he was shot 14 times by a still-unknown assailant in Germantown near West Seymour Street. Years of looking for the perpetrator have left detectives and Robbins stumped. And the refusal of anyone to come forth has been about as painful as losing her son.

“Every day I put my feet on the ground, my biggest prayer is somebody will speak up. Somebody knows [something],” Robbins said.

Walke was one of the 277 lives taken that year by gun violence in Philadelphia. Robbins said, like Love, she has used her pain to become an advocate, helping others, especially to navigate working with detectives, which can be a frustrating experience for families members trying to get updated information.

A major goal of the healing center as it marks its 25th anniversary is to prevent further violence. A day after the festival, on Sunday at 11:35 p.m., police found the body of 16-year-old William Honesty on Martin Luther King Jr. High School grounds, bleeding from a gunshot wound to the chest. Medics pronounced him dead at the scene.

Although gun-related homicides are down about 40% from last year, Love said each death represents a failure of community.

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To that end, Love is planning an even larger event for next year — one that invites more of Philadelphia’s 1.6 million residents to each take a part in ending gun homicides that have taken their collective toll on the entire city.