It started back in 1996 as one mother’s defiant response to the senseless gun violence that robbed her of her 15-year-old son Louis, who was killed in the crossfire of gang gunplay on Geneva Avenue in December 1993. This Sunday, more than a quarter-century after Tina Chéry and a few hundred participants stepped off for a 3.5 mile stroll through the neighborhood, the Mother’s Day Walk for Peace will hit Boston’s streets yet again – and in-person for the first time in three years.

The walk has evolved into a much bigger undertaking, with a longer route that loops from Town Field to Madison Park in Roxbury and back to Fields Corner. And there are now thousands who typically join the ranks for some or all of the journey.

But at its roots, this is still very much a Dorchester-centric event, energized by the activism of our neighbors and their allies.

The walk-a-thon is the largest fundraiser of the year for the Louis D. Brown Peace Institute, the Fields Corner-based non-profit that works with families victimized by homicides. The objective this year is to raise $600,000— a sum that will power the Peace Institute’s programming and outreach in our city and beyond.

The institute is now led by two co-directors: Rachel Rodrigues and Alexandra Chéry Dorrelus, along with its first-ever all-female board of directors. Like most of the people involved in the organization’s day-to-day work, Chéry Dorrelus is a survivor. She is the younger sister of Louis D. Brown.

“The growth of the organization and what we’re offering today has been grounded in all of the staff’s experiences, because a good number of us are survivors ourselves,” she told the Reporter last year. “In listening to the survivor community and in listening to each other, we’ve built a foundation on serving others.”

Interrupting the cycle of dysfunction and trauma that fuels much of the violence in our city has long been at the center of the Peace Institute’s work. And in a nation that is once again experiencing a surge in violent crime and homicides, the mission is critical.

The Peace Institute is one of the reasons that Boston has — so far— been an outlier in the troubling national spike. Statistics from the Boston Police Department released this week show that Boston has recorded nine murders since the beginning of 2022— three fewer than in the same span of time in 2021, and 11 fewer than the five-year average of 2020.

But, as we know too well, gun violence is never eliminated from city streets. Far from it. There have been 46 people shot in Boston so far this year, according to the BPD. And 179 people have been arrested for carrying an illegal gun in the first four months of the year.

There’s no vaccine to end violence in Boston or America. But institutions like our own Peace Institute are essential to serving impacted families and curbing the cycle of violence. We are proud to support them yet again this year as a media sponsor. To register for the walk, which starts at 8 a.m. from Town Field, go to mothersdaywalk4peace.org.