Last week, a professional mover came to my home in the heart of Bowdoin Geneva to help rearrange furniture. “Nice house,” he said, “I grew up around the corner, but we moved out to get away from the violence. We’re in Malden now; it’s a better place to raise my two boys, no gun shots. I just read that the family of the 16-year-old boy who was ambushed on Fuller Street had moved away from this neighborhood too. Is that true?”

I told him I had talked to weeping former neighbors and youth workers at St. Peter’s Teen Center who had known Jonathan Dos Santoso as a good boy from a good family. They are as bewildered and angry and confused about how to stop our young people in our neighborhood from shooting each other as I am.

And in our bewilderment and confusion, we stand in the good company of our mayor and his administration, our city councillors, and all our neighbors in Bowdoin Geneva. We are all trying to figure out the combination of patience, love, and programming that could bring healing justice to the families of the young people on both ends of the gun.

In late May, after a Sunday afternoon “gang-related” shooting of a seven-year-old on Bowdoin Street, members of the Bowdoin Geneva Residents Association gathered with allied organizations from the Bowdoin Geneva Alliance (health and human service providers), Bowdoin Geneva Main Streets (business community), the Sustainability Guild, and faith leaders from St. Peter’s, First Parish Dorchester, and Azusa Christian Community.

We resolved to do more than protest or demonstrate. We wanted to figure out ways we might make our neighborhood stronger, safer, and healthier by partnering the talent, time and credibility of engaged residents with the power and resources of city departments and agencies currently implementing the city’s official public policies and allocating resources to the neighborhoods.

Our goal is to pull together residents and work together with the city to within a year design a five-year action plan that provides residents concrete opportunities to contribute their time and talents to building a better Bowdoin Geneva.

Three weeks after our meeting, where the mayor and 75 other city officials met with and listened to about 300 residents, Father “Doc” Conway stood outside St. Peter’s after the funeral of Jonathan Dos Santoso and said, “We’ve done the marches, and we’ve done everything,” he said. “It’s got to start at home.”

To paraphrase Pogo’s “We have seen the enemy and he is us,” we are suggesting this response: “Home is us.“ Home is right here in Bowdoin Geneva.

How do you pull together residents in this marvelously diverse, lively, jumbled neighborhood and persuade them to work with their city to design an action plan that provides residents with concrete opportunities to contribute their time and talents to building a better Bowdoin Geneva?

For one thing, the effort has to be done very carefully and very slowly; for another thing, it has to be very open and welcoming to everyone who wants to contribute. Not every resident belongs to one of the 22 street and civic associations that are run by volunteers in the Bowdoin Geneva Residents Association. Thousands don’t know we exist, or patronize the businesses on Bowdoin Street, or get served by our health and human service providers.

Conversations to recruit residents into participating are ongoing and will continue: at the Greater Bowdoin Geneva Neighborhood Association as they discuss the development around the Fairmont Line and Geneva Cliffs; at the Meetinghouse Hill Civic Association as they award three scholarships to local youth; at Ceylon Field where soccer leagues for all ages and genders play all weekend; at CVC Unido where residents come to fill out applications for citizenship classes, English for Immigrants, and Kreyol for providers: at the Teen Center at St. Peter’s where parents enroll their kids in summer programs and teens sign up for jobs: at the Bowdoin St Health Center’s Farmers Market and Health Fair; at Ronan Park as the Friends of Ronan Park run their annual Kite Festival starting at 10 a.m. on Sat., June 27; at the corner of Topliff and Bowdoin on Sun., June 28, from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. as the Bowdoin Geneva Residents Association’s kicks off another year of “Working on our Dreams for Bowdoin Geneva” by awarding small cash grants to developing Street Associations.

Onward and hopefully upward we will go together. As Martin Luther King Jr. teaches us, “Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.”