Community

Community Passageways Does the Hard Work to Heal Our Community

Community Passageways

In 2021, King County experienced a massive spike in gun violence. Dom Davis, founder of Community Passageways, stepped up. With the support of the Seattle City Council, Dom made an urgent call for 30 days of peace and took 16 young men at risk of gun violence out of the city. 

“Thirty days of peace was launched with me feeling like we’re in 911 mode. Our young people are dying on a daily basis. We just had two funerals on Saturday, back to back.” 

Dom and his team took youth from two warring groups to two separate sites, one in Phoenix, one in Los Angeles, for 30 days. They paid each young man a stipend for participating in group therapy, mentorship sessions, life skills training, and leadership seminars.  

A short documentary titled 16 Lives, produced with the support of the Seattle Seahawks, chronicles the intervention in a series of vivid interviews and footage of the experience. We highly recommend watching it. “Our community is unsafe for our young black people,” Davis says in the film. “It’s time for us to start doing something different. When we bring these young people back, if we just get 10 of them full-time jobs and good housing situations, we did great. Every penny was worth it.” 

Pagliacci has supported Community Passageways since 2018. In 2020, we launched a fundraiser for them with $45,000 in matching funds. The fundraiser exceeded our wildest dreams, bringing in nearly $153,000. In 2021, we started another campaign and raised almost $45,000. More importantly, we continue to help Dom break the school-to-prison pipeline by providing jobs to create a school-to-life success pipeline and mentoring to Community Passageways youth. 

More recently, Matt Galvin, co-owner of Pagliacci, has been quietly building support for the Youth Achievement Center, a project designed for and by youth that will offer more than 45,000 square feet of housing and services to more than 100 young people in the Columbia City area. Services offered will include health care, child care, counseling, job and life skills classes, employment navigation, financial literacy and technology training, as well as a full-service cafeteria and kitchen. According to Dom, the project needs roughly $10 million to begin construction and will require about $30 million for ongoing operations. 

As reported by the South Seattle Emerald, Dom said, “[The city, county and state] are dealing with homelessness, they’re dealing with the education system, they’re dealing with gun violence — this right here is an answer in our community to deal with a lot of that. This is going to be a space of safety, a space to grow, a space to be taught and trained.” 

At Pagliacci, we’re proud supporters of Community Passageways and proud to stand in the company of other strong supporters like the Seattle Seahawks, Macrina Bakery, Merlino’s, and DeLaurenti Foods.  

Publish Date: January 19, 2022