by Luna Reyna
After a shooting in a Safeway parking lot in South Seattle made headlines in July, Marty Jackson’s name became known across the state, but for people living, working, and raising their families in South Seattle, Marty Jackson has been a familiar face throughout her entire life and community pillar for peace as the executive director of SE Network SafetyNet for over 13 years.
“You hear all this negative media out here,” Jackson said during the press conference in August. “Bet you didn’t know we were here for the last three years, did you? Until 10 o’clock that night. Just as we have to take the negative things that happened in this parking lot, we also have to celebrate the lives that were saved and the lives that have been saved as a result of what these folks do.”
This is part of an occasional series in the South Seattle Emerald™ called Grassroots Responders, to highlight ongoing and steady efforts to build a diverse and strong community in the South End.
The SE Network SafetyNet Safe Passage Program set up a Community Healing Space in the Safeway parking lot in response to the 2020 shooting and killing of two young Black men, Christopher Wilson Jr., 35, and De’Andre Roberts, 23. Each Friday night, team members and community groups met under bright blue awnings to create a positive atmosphere in an area known for gun violence. Safeway informed them that from January 2021, when Safe Passage started there, until the shooting in July, there had been no incidents of gun violence.
During the August press conference, Jackson talked about moving forward with love. “We didn’t start [Safe Passage] because we were motivated by fear,” Jackson said. “Although we were fearful at times. We didn’t start this motivated by fear, we started motivated by love. I love this place.”
And Jackson’s love for the neighborhood is a big part of what drives her service.
Serving Community Since Childhood
As a Rainier Beach High School graduate, Jackson’s roots are in South Seattle. “I am a young person who grew up in the neighborhood and came back to the neighborhood to work so I am very invested in my neighborhood,” Jackson said. She says this is common for people and families she knew and grew up with in Rainier Beach because of the family-oriented culture where everyone knew one another and their parents.
“There was this really tight connection with the neighborhood; so going to school our parents knew each other,” Jackson said. “So when you think about the teenagers being out in the neighborhood, there was always this accountability because you knew everybody knew who you were.”
Jackson was born into a family that served the community. Her parents were Von Tresckow and Betty Patu. They were both public servants and made it a priority for their children to serve their community as well. They were both educators for Seattle Public Schools for over 25 years and community leaders, activists, and local organizers in Seattle before Jackson was born. As she grew into adulthood, she saw them serve the community by providing basic needs, educational support, summer enrichment, employment, systems navigation, and advocacy. Her mother served on the Seattle School Board, representing South Seattle’s District 7 for 10 years.
“I feel like because I grew up in it, I was born into it, it kind of was inevitable,” Jackson said.
She took her first social service job at 14: a reading tutor at the Rainier Vista Boys and Girls Club. In high school, Jackson became the youth coordinator for the Seattle Youth Involvement Network for the City of Seattle, where she raised awareness about violent and biased policing practices and advocated for improving law enforcement relationships in the community, particularly with Youth of Color.
Jackson graduated from Rainier Beach High School with honors and received a four-year academic scholarship to the University of Washington that she turned down because she was pregnant with her first son. At 24, she attended Seattle Central, earning an Associate of Arts degree in liberal arts, and went on to complete her Bachelor of Arts in sociology at Seattle Pacific University while raising her son and new daughter.
Before landing at SE Network SafetyNet at the Boys and Girls Club, Jackson had been working with young adults and families for over a decade. She worked for a number of nonprofit organizations in direct services as a case manager, as a tutor, as a family support worker, and as a youth advocate. Now, as SE Network executive director, she benefits from knowing exactly what that’s like in many of the different roles she oversees.
SE Network SafetyNet
In 2008, gun violence took the lives of several Seattle youth. “Although we’ve had gang issues in Seattle, or gangs have been prevalent in Seattle, there really weren’t any fatalities amongst young people,” Jackson said. In an attempt to address the rising violence among youth, SE Network SafetyNet was funded to support kids affected by gun violence, perpetrators of gun violence, and victims of gun violence. Jackson became aware of the program as a parent because her son was 16 at the time and experiencing a lot of violence among his peers, so she enrolled him in the program.
Growing up in Rainier Beach, Jackson knew the coordinator of the program at the time, as well as some of the people at the Rainier Vista Boys and Girls Club. She realized the need for the anti-gun-violence program not only as a parent, but also as a community member and someone who had worked in social services for almost her entire adult life. When a position opened for an SE Network intake and referral specialist, Jackson applied and has been with SE Network since June 2010.
Many people know Jackson from the blue tents scattered around South Seattle, including the Safeway parking lot where the shooting occurred that put the Safe Passage program on Seattle’s front pages. The program started in March 2015 as a place-based, non-arrest intervention to deter negative behavior and reduce assaults and fight disturbances by providing supervision, guardianship, violence interruption, and the positive presence of caring adults from the community, according to Jackson.
The intention has been to turn what police call “hot spots” in the Rainier Beach neighborhood into “safety zones” by activating spaces where Jackson and the Safe Passage team bring a positive presence through food, music, and other supports and build positive relationships with youth and adults.
SE Network also holds what are called Community Circle programs, where youth are given the opportunity to sit with peers and unpack any personal trauma and trauma caused by community violence. It presents an opportunity to find support and build community through shared experiences. “Whether facing difficult challenges or celebrating meaningful accomplishments, coming together in a circle promotes empathy, resilience, and connection,” Jackson said.
SE Network SafetyNet has a range of other targeted programs like individualized care management to support youth in achieving their goals and housing, education, employment, health care support, and more. What’s consistent throughout all of the programming is the importance of building individual relationships with youth and community members.
Related by Relationship
“That’s where we start and it’s where we end,” Jackson said. “All the services are secondary to the relationship. There have been plenty of moments where we thought a kid might have needed something, but we were wrong. We found that when we built a relationship with them, we got a chance to know and realize what they really needed.”
The level of care and concern that Jackson and her team put into building relationships have been matched by many of the youth that they serve. One young man began regularly referring to Jackson as “Auntie Marty.” “Auntie” is a term of endearment in many Communities of Color for people who may not be related by blood but are like family. This same young man calls other SE Network staff he is close with “Auntie” as well, and as time went on, other kids have begun to address staff as family too.
“It’s a cultural value to build relationships with people, to get to know who a person is at their core,” Jackson said. “I think it is a compliment when they call you [Auntie], you know that it’s genuine and that the kids know that you’re genuine. Then they’re willing to trust you and when they’re willing to trust you, then they are willing to be vulnerable and when they’re willing to be vulnerable with you, and disclose who they are, it allows for us to be able to invest in them in a way that others wouldn’t be able to.”
Jackson says she takes this very seriously. “I think that these relationships allow for us to peel back the layers and really help young people at their core for what they really need,” Jackson said.
As time goes on, the kids move on and go to college and live their lives, but sometimes Jackson gets to see how the work they do impacts the lives of the kids they supported. One example of this is Jackson’s current restorative justice coordinator, Tanisha Scott.
Jackson met Scott when she was 12 years old. Scott participated in the first cohort of youth in the Teen Café Program. After Scott graduated from high school and went off to college, she would come back and work at the Boys and Girls Club’s summer camps. After graduating from college, she came back to work for SE Network full-time, where she manages some of the programs that she was once a part of.
“I’ve seen her transition, because a lot of us who grew up in the neighborhood, we were in survival mode, and you don’t really know — consciously know — you’re in survival mode until you get older,” Jackson said. “To be able to watch all of her growth … It’s been amazing to watch. To see her grow, and all of the things that are still ahead of her, has been so inspiring.”
Jackson said that it’s stories like Scott’s and her own children and grandchildren that inspire her to keep doing the work she’s doing and working to make a difference. These are the people she thinks about when she begins to get discouraged. “That’s what really motivates me, because when you lose people, it definitely has the impact of [failure].”
Responding to Crisis
Jackson says 2023 was the worst year of gun violence she can remember for at least 20 years. Because SE Network is so close to so many South Seattle youth and community members, when they hear of incidents of gun violence, everyone is in a panic working to find out who was involved. “Young people, families we work with, but also some of our relatives have been victims,” Jackson said. “That has also been disheartening. There is this personal impact that gun violence has had.”
The work SE Network does has been proven to make an impact. The Safe Passage program’s success is a great example of that, but they are only able to serve a few hundred youths per year in each program. Jackson says they would like to expand. “Our goal would be to get more resources so that we can better serve more kids, because there are more just within Southeast Seattle.”
For residents of Seattle who want to contribute to supporting the work that SE Network does, Jackson says that everyone has “time, talent, or treasure” they can provide.
“I’m a big proponent of if you’re not called to do that, don’t do that,” Jackson said. “I can speak for myself and my colleagues. This is what we chose. Other people chose to be doctors, lawyers, there’s something you can contribute, right? Because if we’re making it safer in the neighborhood, that includes you and everybody else, well, then you need to contribute to these efforts. We aren’t asking you to play the role we play, we’re asking you to do something within your sphere of influence and your resources.”
This article is published under a Seattle Human Services Department grant, “Resilience Amidst Hate,” in response to anti-Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander violence.
Luna Reyna is a former columnist and reporter for the Emerald. As a South Seattle writer and broadcaster she has worked to identify, support, and promote the voices of the systematically excluded in service of liberation and advancing justice. Her work has also appeared in Prism Reports, Talk Poverty, and Crosscut where she was their Indigenous Affairs Reporter. Luna is proud of her Little Shell Chippewa and Mexican heritage and is passionate about reporting that sheds light on colonial white supremacist systems of power. She is currently the Northwest Bureau Chief for ICT and Underscore News. Follow her on X @lunabreyna
📸 Featured Image: Marty Jackson as SE Network executive director leads teams that work to build community and relationships to prevent crime and enhance public safety. (Photo: Alex Garland)
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