Episode 04: The Uber of Conflict Resolution
Phiilly Truce: Steven Pickens (left) and Mazzie Casher (right)
Illustration by Alexander Bustamante
In episode three, Maytal meets Mazzie Casher and Steven Pickens, the founders of the Philly Truce app. Steven and Mazzie, who have been friends for over three decades, decided to develop the app in 2021 as a way of responding to the gun violence epidemic in their hometown of Philadelphia. As described by Steven, the Philly Truce app can be conceptualized as the Uber or the Doordash of conflict resolution and mediation. It’s an innovative, out of the box approach to healing conflict that has the potential to expand far beyond the city lines of Philadelphia. To support the Philly Truce app, visit their website: https://www.phillytruce.com.
Transcript
Maytal: Hi, I’m Maytal, and welcome to Heal With It - a podcast about healing in its many, and sometimes unexpected forms.
[Music Interlude]
Maytal: Several months ago, my co-producer on this podcast, Camille, sent me a text with a link and a message attached. She wrote: “You have to look at this. Now.”
When I clicked on the link she sent me, it took me to a news segment about an app, called Philly Truce. Immediately, I was blown away.
The app was developed by two ambitious men living in Philadelphia. I’ll let them introduce themselves.
[Mazzie Casher: Hey guys, my name is Mazzie Casher. I am a recording artist, a storyteller and the co-creator of the Philly Truce.]
[Steven Pickens: Hey everyone. My name is Steven Pickens. I'm a firefighter and a co-creator of the Philly Truce app.]
Steven and Mazzie have known each other since high school, which, if you do the math, means that they have known each other for over three decades. Growing up together in Philly, they witnessed an epidemic of gun violence plague their communities. For so long, this felt like a fact of reality for them, like this static characteristic over which they had no power to control. But in October 2020, something shifted, and the two of them decided it was time to create change. And so that’s how their relationship evolved from not only a friendship, but into a business partnership. And together they created the Philly Truce app.
At its core, their app is meant to work as a tool of healing for the gun violence epidemic in Philly. The app offers an innovative and accessible way to heal and mediate conflict. It’s clever, it’s out of the box, and it’s a model for a program that can expand far beyond the city lines of Philadelphia.
In today’s conversation, I got to learn not only how this app works, but how Steven and Mazzie have come to see the world, and have come to understand what it means to heal.
I learned so much from our conversation and I hope you do too. So let’s dive in.
[Music Interlude]
Maytal: So let's get started today with probably the most obvious and most important question. What is the Philly trues app for those listening and who don't know about it, or don't know what it is?
Steven: That Philly true set puts Philadelphians with knowledge of potentially violent conflicts and contact with trained mediators 24/7.
Mazzie: And when we say people with knowledge of potentially violent conflicts, that's key because right now, in Philadelphia, we're living through a gun violence epidemic of, I mean, huge proportions, historic proportions, actually. And so when we say, “If you have knowledge of potentially violent conflict,” we mean community members, neighbors, relatives, most importantly of people who, you know, are in situations that could very well end in gun violence. We're asking and encouraging those members of those families and communities to push the get help button. And when they push the get help button, they'll be asked very few questions: name, email addresses, optional phone number, and you know, the nature of why you're calling in a very brief summary. After that they can send the chat over to a mediator who will get in on the other end and, uh, reach back out to them either via text or you can also call from within the app. But mostly we are training them to respond with a text first: “Hey, are you safe? Can you talk, can we call you?” And then it goes from there, the process of assessing whether or not we can intervene and what that might look like, or if we need to refer out to other wraparound services. So that's initially how the app works.
Steven: If it's also a police case, we will treat it as such. We would just let you know that we are not able to handle that call.
Maytal: Do you think it could be a good alternative though, to involving police, given some of the history with police involvement?
Mazzie: Absolutely. I mean, we, we designed it with the thought in mind that we, as the community needs to help ourselves. So we encouraged the community to call for help and to be the help. We had a call to action for volunteer mediators. We had over 150 people register, and go through a training. Uh, we ended up through attrition with a smaller number, but the response was powerful. And now we have a core team of about 20, 25 trained mediators, trained by four gentlemen with well over a hundred years experience of conflict resolution mediation, including two very grassroots gentlemen who do street level, gang level conflict mediations regularly.
Maytal: It's so powerful when people who are actually involved and within the community are the people who get involved, rather than bringing out outside figures to manage something.
Mazzie: Yeah. Well we thought that for several reasons, I mean the deterrents that are in place have always been in place. The efforts that have been initiated, you know, whether it's stop and frisk or, you know, more the whole law and order or building more prisons and stricter laws. And I mean, you know, none of those things are real deterrents for whatever reasons. And the reasons are probably many, but we just felt like those are more or less intellectual deterrents. A person may know if I do this, this could happen, but you know, most decisions are made emotionally. And you know, a lot of times in these situations, in these families and these ongoing, uh, rivalries that lasts throughout generations and, you know, sometimes these people don't even know why they're beefing with the people from two or three blocks away. These are all emotional decisions, right?
The community has the ability to offer an emotional deterrent, if you will. Right? Because we know these people, we love these people. I think the only thing between us taking action and us not having taken action for so long is just that we become apathetic. We become numb and we've kind of accepted the narrative that this is the way it is in the city. This is the way it is between black and brown people, poor people in the police. And you know, all of these old, stale, funky American narratives that are starting to be challenged, you know, just like with the Me Too movement. And, you know, we see, we see different things pop up every couple years. And, um, you know, now that the Asian American story is coming to the forefront, it's like all of these things have to be evaluated for their narrative power. They hold to keep certain relationships in certain dynamics.
And then once we can really honestly look at that and acknowledge that that's what's been happening, then we could start to collectively write new narratives. And, you know, like I said, in the beginning, I'm a storyteller. You know, I write songs, I write plays, I write movies. For me, this whole Philly Truce campaign, every ad that I wrote, every press release, every bit of word and verbiage that represented what the Philly Truce app is, has been about creating a different narrative and our communities and the most summaried way that, that we can put it is we have to ask for the help and we have to be the help. And so that's the story that Philly Truce is writing. And so the history of Philadelphia is that we are weak for asking for help. We are strong and intelligent, and we are capable of helping ourselves.
We don't have to become bystanders or be relegated to be bystanders in resolving the issues that we live through on a day to day basis. So it was really a community empowerment play for us. It’s really about writing a new narrative, right? Because we could have any kind of reputation we choose as Philadelphia. You know, I mean for decades and probably centuries, we've had the ironic reputation of being, uh, the city of brotherly love, which is actually quite cold and harsh and standoffish. We feel like we can certainly write a new story and that, and that's what we're envisioning.
Maytal: Beautifully said. Where do you imagine things going? I mean, when this app takes off, if it's used heavily within the community - in five, ten years from now, what is the vision you're hoping to see?
Mazzie: You know, for us, it's like make this structurally enmeshed and ingrained into the fiber and the culture of Philadelphia, right? So for us, we have programs and initiatives for the school district, the prison system, other, uh, NGOs and, and service providers, city agencies. So our vision is that we can present Philadelphia in two years time as a model for this type of community-led policy making, really, cause that's another thing that we're advocating for. As you know, we - when we talked to politicians, we really stressed that look, you should be funding what we think is a good idea, right? Essentially you work for us, right? We put you there, a politician shouldn't necessarily even need to have their own opinion, right? You should be a mouthpiece and a voice for, for what we tell you we need. And we're really stressing that community sourced solutions are the way the go.
And those are the things that's going to make a difference. So when you talk about, you know, five years down the line, when there's a Chi-town truce and an Orlando truce in the Detroit truce and a St. Louis truce - these are the type of differences we would like to see: community source, government enforced, corporate endorsed solutions. You know, cause right now the money flows from the top, hollows out the government and everybody else suffers from the externalization. And this is where we've gotten - look at where we're at, right? The only thing that stopped mass shootings was the pandemic, right? Pandemics over here coming to mass shootings. I mean, we put up with sick things in this country. Like we put up with very sick, sick behavior on all levels of society and the people with the foot on their neck really know what it feels like. And so the solutions have to come from the bottom and that's our vision for fanning this way of thinking out, we see Truce as a national movement, community empowerment, and really bringing the political structure to support the initiatives and the narratives that the community wants to write for themselves. So that was kind of the vision, at least as the way I see it.
Maytal: It's like, you didn't just make an app. You're starting a revolution, a paradigm shift. And one that I think is so important because as you said so powerfully, so often policies get made by people at this top level that have no skin in the game that aren't involved in the communities themselves, that don't feel the negative effects or the positive effects of those policies.
Steven: We also like to say, we have been receiving some support, even on a national level with the policies and voting for the South Carolina loophole or, you know, common sense gun laws from congressmen, Dwight Evans as well, he's a very big supporter of this Philly Truce movement because he's also a native Philadelphian. So, you know, it's affecting not only us, but it's affecting politicians that live within the city limits.
Maytal: Such an important point. And it's cool to see so many people involved, excited behind your vision and your mission. I feel like it's a very good sign for things.
[Short Break - Music Interlude]
Maytal: My question is, how did y'all come together to do this? What's the story behind that?
Steven: Mazzie and I met at William Penn high school in Philadelphia. I think we, we met maybe in the 9th or 10th grade, but over the course of those years, we developed a close friendship. Even after high school, we were roommates for a while, you know, in between deciding exactly what it is we wanted to do with ourselves in life [laughter] and Mazzie was very generous and took me in, not that I was homeless or anything, but we were really close. We reconnected after, you know, so many years, life takes so many different ways. But we reconnected at a former classmates grand opening of his barbershop. And on that weekend, there was a shooting in the west Philadelphia section of the city. And it caught my attention. Actually, one of my work colleagues was giving me the information on it as I was driving to the grand opening.
And I didn't see it on the news. I didn't hear anything about it. He just told me about it. So this was a week after the Walter Wallace shooting. That was the last police shooting in Philadelphia that occurred. So I just approached the whole celebration just feeling like we have to fill the void for those that have been doing this for a number of years, but we're old enough now to fill that void in terms of what should we do next? Where will we go from here? Because if we can't carry that mantle, then we're in a very devastating period now. So I could only imagine where we would be if you know, everyone kind of just sat back and watched the news and said, “oh that's, that's a shame,” and kind of like put the for sale signs up and just go into a different reality.
So that's when, you know, I talked to a few people that day about this, like, what are we going to do? And then my good friend Mazzie comes along at which I didn’t expect for him to be there. And he asked me, “Do you want to do something about it?” And he said, “If you're ready then, okay, let's do something about it.” Then we said okay, well let's talk tomorrow. And then through talks, we came up with the idea of having the trained mediators in the community, through a telephone call to try to mediate. And then through more talks, when Mazzie came up with an idea and asked me, “What about an app?” And I was like that's even better. So that's where we arrived today with the Philly Truce app.
Maytal: You know, what's interesting Mazzie, you said something earlier about wanting to break through the cycle of apathy and how people kind of see how things are, get used to it, and in a way, give up, and you two broke through that. You two see each other and said, “We need to do something here.” What do you think it was that allowed each of you to break through that apathy, which, you know, could be synonymous with exhaustion, burnout, trauma?
Mazzie: That's a great question. And I think both of us seeing our classmates kind of step into that very adult shopkeeper, pillar of the community kind of status - he's at the ribbon cutting with his wife and you know, this is a guy we've seen grow up and struggle and, you know, go through his own real major challenges. And I think it struck us both that it's just time for us to be responsible. You know, I think what may have spared us from the apathy. I mean, you know, Steve's a firefighter, you know, he's been married 20 something years. I mean, he's a solid guy, right? So I think he has a certain vantage point. And for me, I've been fortunate to live in other places and travel somewhat extensively, you know, certainly out of the country, and a a couple of continents, and been able to live other places for years at a time and absorb and compare to the quality of life in Philadelphia some of the other places I've lived. So I think with the convergence of all of those things that we just thought, why not us? I've seen Steve launch other businesses and go through trials with that. I mean, he's seen me, you know, navigate a 20-something-year career in the entertainment business. I think we just felt like why not us? I think we're both still amazed every day at just how far and fast this is going. But I think every day is some point in the day. If we don't say it, we think it, you know, why not us? You know, why not feel each truth? We meet great people. I mean, extremely talented people, brilliant people every day who volunteer their time and their talents and their hearts and souls to just rolling up their sleeves and helping us move this forward. So I think it's just a fateful fateful journey we're on
Steven: Going back to the George Floyd protesting, businesses were getting looted, fires were being set. It was a very devastating time in this city. I mean, I know across the country as well, but it seems almost orchestrated but it really hit me and I just wanted to say that like my wife -because she saw how intently I was watching the television on was really, I don't watch a lot of TV other than basketball or maybe football other than that, you know, TV's off for me. She suggested that I get involved with one of the neighborhood organizations. And to be honest, I couldn't think of any to get involved with. And I never saw myself actually being the head of, uh, not just the organization, but also a startup, an app designed to help the communities, to help the citizens. But also, you know, it is becoming a startup business as well.
So I'm like blown away, but I'm saying that to say it was pretty sad that I was not able to find something to do in order to help, to use my abilities, that’s similar to how we have provided for others that really want to help.
What type of people do I think signed up for the mediator training? I really believe it was people like myself and Mazzie that were sort of at a loss of a place to help that would really be effective and show some type of measurement in terms of the progress that's being made. And I believe that's part of the downfall that this violence prevention arena hasn't grown or kept up with the present time. And that's another great thing this app does, is now it brings violence prevention into the Uber and Doordash and Amazon, all these other, um, large scale ways of reaching people.
It brings that into the forefront. Now we also still need those local organizations and city agencies and most of all, the citizens. So not only does it bring exposure to these people that have been doing this for so many years, also with the citizens, it gives someone a chance to do something that before something new that wasn't there. Cause I don't want to in any way discount the neighborhood organizations that are in the city and across the country that have been doing this work, but now we can offer a supplement for them to be that much more effective. And together we do this.
Maytal: Pretty brilliant to think of it as sort of the Uber, the door dash of violence, mediation. It's so smart. It's such a good idea. And I'm curious to learn more about the mediation. Like, so we talked before about how it kind of works. There's an assessment that's run through to determine whether a mediator could be helpful in mitigating the conflict. Say it's assessed that a mediator is helpful. So does the mediator show about the scene? Does the mediator like pop up on the phone on the app? How does that play out?
Mazzie: Well, like for example, today we have a team - I’m actually curious to find out how it went at three o'clock to meet a woman who used the app on maybe Saturday night, Sunday night. And I guess I'm saying that just to illustrate, this is not a 9-1-1 paced operation, right? So, and people are getting that, which is awesome. The woman calls, she says, what's going on, quite a few feuds between quite a few different neighbors. You know, this is her take on it. Okay. So I ask her to tell me a little bit more, who's involved. It seems like it's a thing where in her mind, half the block is split against the other half. So she has her side of the story. So we say to her, well, you got other people who can corroborate this with you or do you have some people who will come out if we say, okay, let's do a block restorative justice circle, right? Let's invite everybody out on the block to air this out. So she said, “Yeah, I have a few people because we had a few petitions going.”
So now these two mediators are going to go out today and, you know, kind of do an intake form and an intake process, and they'll even see in that, do they see where this woman might benefit for some wraparound services, maybe some therapy, maybe she has one other issue that we know about for sure that we have to refer out, which is she has a squatter living next door to her in the house that's owned by the housing authority. So that's obviously something beyond our resources, but we should be able to find someone to kind of put some pressure on that process. After today, they'll come back, they'll talk to the director of mediation and you know, probably me and Steve and we'll put the plan of action together.
And like, I think we already really discussed in this situation. It's probably going to be like, we put together a date and we go on to say, we're going to have a block restorative justice circle and invite the entire street out, you know, probably door to door, do some kind of robo call, text, blast, you know, whatever information we can get from these people. So that was one, one scenario. Now we got another one going on this week where a single dad kinda in the beef with the current wife of his ex. Now that's something a little bit more touchy. And these are, there's been talks about, you know, wanting to do something violent and on one side and on the other side, having the capacity and being within his rights to do something violent. So that's going to require a different approach. And right now, as we speak, actually, I just got a call.
So I think the kind of second conversation with the gentleman who used the app has taken place and it's already kind of been determined that he probably does need some wraparound services, maybe some substance abuse counseling, then it's going to be a balancing act of, can we get him to do that? I mean, if he does that, his problems will go away almost instantly because he's not going to be available for these interactions with picking up the son. And you know, so many ways these things can get cooled of; it’s just really important that people continue to do what they're doing and recognize when they're at their breaking points. It's a case by case thing. And it's always about either getting people to a table and reaching some kind of agreement or like with the black thing, you know, I think it'll be fairly, um, I want to say easy, but I think once everybody has their opportunity to say their peace and a lot of the steam I think will diminish and then hopefully everything can kind of de-escalate, at least for a time. So those are like some of, you know, at least two of the ways it could go.
Maytal: I just think what you guys are doing is so revolutionary and important and something I've, you know, kind of frustrates me about the mental health world is I feel like we come up with these ideas and they're so siloed for people to heal. They have to come to a therapist, office and an office building, or like have to go to a psychiatrist office to get medicine. You're bringing the healing into the community and empowering community members to heal each other. I have a question that I'm curious for both of you, what do you think from doing this and just, I dunno from life, what do you think you've learned when it comes to healing conflict? What's the best way we can heal conflict?
Mazzie: I think if people have a place a means, a resource, an outlet, something where they can be heard and feel hurt. I think a lot of the pressure is released and I feel like a person can talk themselves off of the ledge if they know they have someone they can talk to. It really is about communication, it really is about being able to use your words, like they tell kids, it’s really that simple. And the more impacted and traumatized a person is, you know, in the way of being unable to use their words, to have emotional literacy or vocabulary, then the closer they are to acting out, and it’s really about being able to talk about it. That's what I'm learning.
Steven: Yes. As Mazzie was talking, I was thinking, I just believe as a society, we’ve grown to a point where not controlling our rage has become cool. So at this point, I feel as though that we have to counter that culture of going over the edge because we see it in the movies, we hear it so often and in the music - not just in rap music - we've had anger as a natural emotion, but now it has been uncontrolled and unmanaged for so long. And so many individuals - until human beings, we’re followers, we're all following something. I'm a follower, we're all followers. I look at it in terms of changing for people that it doesn't take much for them to be pushed over the edge, changing the fact that you still have to stand by your own opinion and have your own way of looking at life in terms of all the other influences that are thrown at us and particularly for the teens now, they like - as I mentioned, we're forty six years old - we, we don't have even half of the things that the youth now have to contend with in terms of their decision-making, their viewpoints on life. What seems cool. And what's not cool. So, I mean, it's just a stronger culture of influence that's going on that causes people to act out in ways that normally they wouldn't, if they didn't see it so often that this is how people act.
Maytal: And so what do you think Steve is the solution to that? Or how do people heal from that? How do people get away from that sort of explosive emotional energy or that being trendier, that being modeled
Steven: There's many layers to that. I mean, beginning with the entertainment industry playing less violent music or on social media, some of the teens and younger people had been raised on social media without any type of supervision. So I just think it's a matter of changing how we're moving forward and being responsible and handling the technology for one and also what the youth or even young adults, or even up to adults view as the proper way to address their own anger issues. Because I'm not sure what it's like in Austin, but in Philadelphia it's, I mean, it's angry people everywhere, but I've been fortunate to travel, so it's always nice to get an outlet to go visit other places or cities or, you know, other countries. It's just a level of politeness that isn’t always prevalent here.
It's a little colder, it's a little more isolated, it's a rat race. So people are, you know, just kinda like caught up in their own heads and you go, oh, hold the door for someone. And they'll just walk by and don't say, “Thank you.” Or just simple stuff like that is missing. And it all leads to a greater dissipation of human behavior in terms of just being a polite person. So I just think at this point, we really would need to be able to have a healthier dose of what it's like to actually be a, a person that has values and moral and on top of other things - and in terms of, at the core of it, how do we handle our conflicts?
Maytal: Mmhm, and it feels like what y'all are doing is connected to that because you're fostering community and connection. And I feel like that sort of community and connection helps hold people accountable to not just, you know, ignore or hurt or spew out pain.
Mazzie: Yeah. I think the more you, you know, the more you know a person or the more familiar you are, the harder it is to ignore their pain, right? When you know these people, you know these people, I think we're just very cut off from one another. I think probably nationally, you know what I mean? I think the other part of it is we have a big, you know, we have like a less for, for punishment in this country. We always want to see him right in jail right in hell. And I hope they go, you know, it's just like, come on, man. You know, like we're at the brink right here from that whole, that whole psychology of punish, punish, punish. This is like, we gotta, we gotta get some compassion and some mercy. And we, you know, I think where we're close to, you know, that kind of implosion, I think it has been happening in different ways, but you know, America going to have to hit, hit a few more bottoms, I think, before we really start thinking in a collective conscious kind of way, like, man, we gotta try some different stuff here, you know? And, uh, I do believe some of it we’ll age out of and evolve out of, but we definitely have to, you know, have to help usher it in as well.
You know, it's, it's just, it's kind of a trip the way, uh, how hell bent we are on certain, you know, retribution and stand your ground and all this kind of stuff. And it's like, you know, man, we're all out here living making mistakes, you know, you pay the price for some stuff, you know, hopefully you can get on with your life. But you know, the, the punishment factor in America is a big part I think of what trickles down to the neighborly discontent, you know what I mean? It's like, this is this, you know, we got it. We just got to spread some love though. So it was important to spread love and keep spreading love. And that's all you can really do.
Maytal: So interesting because I've because of this podcast, I've talked to so many people that are, you know, creating really cool stuff like y'all, and it always seems to come back to this idea of like, we need more compassion and we need more empathy and we need to admit to our mistakes and just connect with each other over that. There needs to be a media PR campaign where it's cool to be vulnerable and it's cool to ask for help. And it's cool to admit I'm not perfect and I need someone's support.
Mazzie: Yeah. That's I mean, that's, that's part of the stuff we build into. We have a few ads and, uh, television spots ready to go. We just very plainly show people in the scenarios where we know, at least for the African-American community in Philadelphia, they will certainly identify with them and the situations. And it kinda just says like, yo, now's a good time to use that app. You know what I mean? Like, because really what it is is that we are asking you to consider letting us as your neighbors help you? You know, it’s funny, some people in the very beginning were like, “Uh, what are you going to pull this app out in the gunfight?” Like they were just like, but now we like, nah, you call us before that. We don't think that either. You know what I mean?
Just think about if you might want to steer this person in a different direction, you know, before they have to deal with the police, you know, the people that have used it are like really grateful when like, when I hang up from talking with them, like the first encounter, they're like really appreciative of it because it really is like, at least on the first call, especially they're like they're flushing the toilet, you know, they lay everything out and it's just like, whoa, each one of those calls for me has been like an hour and it’s mostly me just listening to them: “And I did this and I went over there and they didn't help me. And I called this guy 20 times and I got this on video tape and the police came and they've been through this.” You know? And it's like, wow, you know, it's almost 2 million people here. You know, what percentage of them feel like that? You know what I mean?
Maytal: You're like doing therapy.
Mazzie: It’s definitely therapy. There is definitely an element of therapy to this. For sure.
Maytal: It's amazing what you guys are doing. If people want to learn more about the two of you individually, want to learn more about filet trues, where do you recommend they go or check out,
Mazzie: Oh, please go www.phillytruce.com and we can gladly accept donations there. We really could use financial support if people in the Philadelphia area or even beyond interested in becoming mediators because you can, you know, take a call from anywhere and have a conversation. They could send us a message like from Gmail, let's say, and say I want to be a mediator. If you want to get the app, you can go to the app store and check it out. You can also request to become a mediator there on the app. And we'll explain to you the process. And, um, you know, if nothing else, spread the word, if you're listening outside of the Philadelphia area, but you have family or relatives or friends back east, you know, let them know. So, um, www.phillytruce.com. And if you’re on social media, we're @phillytruce on every platform. So, you know, we can always use the support and the mentions and the follows and all of that good stuff to spread the word.
Maytal: I'm so excited to watch how this app progresses, how the program you’re developing expands out to other cities and to other spaces. It's just awesome that you guys have done. And I just want to say, thanks for being here today for the good conversation.
Mazzie and Steven:Thank you.
Maytal: I really appreciate your time so much and appreciate both of you as human beings and what you're contributing to the world. It's awesome. Thank you.