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Our Vision: To change the way Nashville understands, views, and creates community.  We will be the strongest, most effective grassroots army for children, generating a new, courageous group of leaders. We lead with razor sharp focus and with a clear vision for breathing meaning, hope and love back into our communities.   

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Our Values: Our commitment to integrity, honesty, justice and restoration lie at the heart of who we are and what is important to us.

We are an army, a tribe, which believes in the value of teamwork and in the spirit of cooperative effort within our organization and within and across our communities. We take pride in creating an atmosphere of both friendship and membership where we actively listen to each other, defend those who are not present, build trust and display integrity in our actions as well as our words. We keep our promises and honor commitments to ourselves, each other and the community.  Our actions with you will always be consistent with our mission, vision and core values.  

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What We Do: Utilizing research-based best practices combined with community outreach, Gideon’s Army builds its restorative justice programs based upon this information and uses program results and community input to guide its policy work. Through intensive volunteer and community training as well as dialogue, the voice of the population being served is centered throughout the entire process. This creates healthy alternatives and an environment that allows the youth to learn from their mistakes rather than criminalizing their actions and allowing them to fall prey to the school to prison pipeline.  Gideon’s Army is currently the only local organization in Nashville that focuses solely on addressing youth violence and dismantling the prison pipeline through social activism and community and systems transformation led by children in the prison pipeline, their families, and their community. 

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How We Do It: Gideon’s Army uniquely emphasizes youth empowerment and community member leadership as well as direct interfacing with families, the juvenile courts, and the public school system. Gideon’s Army facilitators, mentors, and other volunteers are members of the North Nashville community, who train fellow youth, educators, and in continuing the process of educating. This training structure creates a positive cyclical pipeline based in restorative juice to combat the destructive effects of the school to prison pipeline.