The group focused on gun violence prevention, and Lexington met with community partners, including the University of Kentucky, to identify solutions for keeping guns out of the hands of youth and young adults.

One Lexington hosted its first ever symposium last week.

Leaders say there is still work to be done.

So when Lexington is a youth and young Adult gun violence initiative.

Out of that, we in the mayor's office and our main focus is of course, reducing gun violence.

But through doing that is finding out what resources are needed in communities that may lack certain resources and, you know, don't receive enough attention.

And by doing that, we are able to realize how we can help lower gun violence by looking at root causes.

So the purpose of this symposium is for one, like to be able to connect with all of the community members within Lexington, to be able to bring everyone together to help prevent gun violence in youth ages 17 to 29.

We want the youth to be informed about the effects of gun violence, the dangers of gun violence, and as a community and for the community to know that there are a lot of the kids in the community that don't want to maybe go down that pathway, but they just need somebody just to give them a lend a hand just to have a conversation with.

We had some people were talking about another session this morning, just seeing kids and community at the park.

Build a relationship, build a rapport with those kids so that they can feel comfortable to share with you and just make that connection.

And I think that'll help in the long run.

As we try to reduce gun violence.

Gun violence has increased and we see it every night on the news every night.

I sit home and I see the reports and I mean, a couple of weekends ago there was almost ten gun violence incidents.

And so to me, it's it's an issue.

And if I worry about my safety, then I know other people are.

And so I can't just be a bystander.

I need to be involved.

And clearly, a lot of other people want to be involved because we've had we have over 150 people registered.

But what we're seeing that we're really excited about is the people engaging and talking amongst each other, figuring out and we're doing right now in a scenario session where we take a scenario from an incident that happened in Lexington.

How would you respond?

How would your organization organized and respond and how can you connect with the maybe another organization at your table, how you can collaborate to be more efficient in helping situations like this?

So this is that's something that we're seeing and we're really excited about that we're taking away is that engagement amongst amongst different organizations.

There's all sorts of different people here today.

We've got trauma nurses, we've got moms against gun violence, we've got legal aid and cops and the mayor.

We've got different nonprofits like one Lex are different new non-profits that are kind of getting their feet on the ground to be involved with this.

And so to me, it's just a great opportunity for people in Lexington with that leadership ability to get together and start working on something.

To me personally, it just means that there is still good people left in this world that care about our youth.

Within Lexington, as well as the state of Kentucky in general.

And they're working really hard to be able to combat the issue of gun violence and just bring attention to that.

So that way individuals are aware that there are programs out there to help protect our youth throughout the future.

One Lexington was created in 2017 as a part of the city's efforts to address a rise in violent crime among ages 13 through 29.