“It’s easy to pull a trigger or something like that, but it’s difficult to look at a brother and have a dialogue and be able to look him in his eyes and say ‘I love you,'” says Marcus James.

The father, uncle and community mentor is challenging men in his Uniacke Square community to do the difficult thing.

After a series of shootings plagued an already marginalized neighbourhood in Halifax’s downtown in 2016, James and a few of his peers decided to look within to find solutions to deep-rooted problems in the community.

“I got tired of attending funerals of young men,” says James. “Talking about it and seeing people hurt, I think just challenged me to say, ‘OK, what can I do?'”

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