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I am the Founder of The Knox Project.

Since 2018, The Knox Project’s mission has always been to educate and spread awareness, emphasizing mutual respect and integrity between young adults and law enforcement, and help Chicago’s minority teens and young adults make better-informed decisions. We have made it our priority to educate young minorities on the dangers of drugs, bullying, gangs, untreated mental health, and the importance of having police in a civil society. We do this by educating the youth on all of the many infractions of the law that they probably were unaware of and why officers might have stopped them. We also educate the youth on the plight of Chicago police officers and how to properly identify and deescalate any escalated interaction they may have with a law enforcement officer. Since 2018, The Knox Project has served well over 20,000 minority youth and has met and dialogued with over 2,000 community organizers & community activists, over 50 minority workgroups, over 150 city and state elected officials , as well as many liaisons and spokespeople that represent the thoughts and views of the Chicago police departments. We have done all of this work in good faith to help solve any problems and concerns in these communities that they may have with law enforcement and use all of the information and methods at our disposal to help to build better police and community relations.

The Knox Project to date has interviewed over 8,000 police officers (from over 18 percent) around the Chicagoland area and have worked closely with over 1,350 off-duty officers in a confidential manner to help identify any implicit or explicit biases that they may have. The Knox Project is an independent NFP and has no ties to any city or state programs. All participating officers are off-duty willing participants. The Knox project has no authority, nor do we exercise any authority over said officers. All of our work, data, and information collected from our interviews, group sessions, and our one-on-one sessions with any of our law enforcement participants are strictly confidential and not disclosed for public, media, news, or any other type of consumption. This is how The Knox Project ensures our integrity, safeguard our reputation, and maintain the privacy of all willing participating officers. Using this type of approach and platform allows us to educate willing officers on a plethora of things, such as: staying current and understanding minority youth culture, the latest slang, what are the concerns in the communities, recommendations, how to spot an escalating interaction, how to identify an individual with possible mental health issues, etc. The list goes on and on. Our main focus is to work with them to help them serve these communities better and improve police and community relations.

The Knox Project has also collected data from all of our police and community programs that we have available. This program is called KP Stats Program. We do this to put forth the best solutions to address issues that the police and the communities at large have had or are currently dealing with. Our research and stat team also monitor areas with high police and minority interactions. The data they have collected over the years is extremely important and can improve future interactions.

I am extremely proud of our dedicated staff and over 200 volunteers who have been out in the city of Chicago making a difference every day. Due to the COVID-19 outbreak, The Knox Project expanded beyond our normal mission to help combat this pandemic. We added the COVID 19 Response to our programming strategy to help fight the disease that was disproportionally targeting our urban neighborhoods in Chicago. Our goal was to confront this challenge head-on with EDUCATION and AWARENESS. Therefore, we were providing free masks and up-to-date CDC guidelines, along with the location and contact information for the surrounding help centers, testing centers, and vaccine centers throughout the city of Chicago. The Knox Project is proud of our work, and I am honored to be leading such an incredible team. Please consider donating to our many programs so that we can continue this much-needed work.

Lenell Knox

Founder