Thank you: Times Herald

Thank You: Daily Republic

Ah, but that rabid, life-changing rascal COVID-19. And “planning for the future” was tossed into the kitchen sink disposal.

“We couldn’t have our Gun Buy-Back for Solano County because we always plan as far out as possible,” Navalta said. “By this time, we would know when the Gun Buybacks would be in Solano and the other cities we do. We’d know when we would launch the Art of Peace Exhibit and in partnership we would know when the career fairs would be.”

With shelter-in-place, “nothing could be planned,” Navalta said, lamenting the loss of fundraising revenue when a golf tournament and annual event were canceled.

Navalta pondered how to maintain the mission statement for the foundation named after her murdered son — “helping save lives” — and devised a Robby Poblete Foundation PPE (Personal Protection Equipment) Kit sent to as many healthcare workers as possible.

The demand has been unbelievable, Navalta said by phone Friday afternoon. Kits have been delivered to FoodMaXX,  Windsor Vallejo Care Center, Legacy at Sonoma, Hazel’s Tranquility House, Travis Credit Union, Lyft, California Medical Facility, Vacaville, Hillcrest Post Acute, Generations Healthcare, Napa State Hospital, and MSK Solutions, Fairfield.

Some kits were delivered to a healthcare worker in New York who sent a plea for PPE when she noticed the Robby Poblete Foundation on Instagram, getting word to Navalta: “The agency I work for does not provide any PPE and we are left to find them on our own. Working in many different homes with many different patients, you can imagine how frightening it is. I am in desperate need.”

The Poblete Foundation kits were also delivered to a grateful Pastor Keanu Ayers at United Pursuit Church in Vallejo, posting that “it was awesome being on the receiving end of kindness.”

More than 1,000 masks, pairs of gloves and hand sanitizers have been delivered, Navalta said, acknowledging Savage & Cooke distillery on Mare Island for donating eight gallons of sanitizer.

“I felt so bad when we started this because we couldn’t give supplies and masks to all those who asked for them,” Navalta said. “We’re not a huge nonprofit. Our approach was to get it directly to the essential workers as long as supplies lasted.”

Some of the funding for the kits was initially earmarked for the Gun Buybacks, Art of Peace Exhibit and vocational training.

“What I did early on was to call those different foundations and plead our case” to redirect the money to PPE, Navalta said.

That would be the city of Vallejo, Wells Fargo, and the California Wellness Foundation.

“All of them said ‘yes’” to creating and delivering PPE kits, Navalta said.

When the aforementioned programs return “is hard to determine right now,” Navalta said. “We’re trying to navigate the new world. We don’t know what that’s going to be. Once we have a clearer picture, of course, we’d love to have the Gun Buybacks. Right now, we’ll continue to fund-raise and continue our mission to save lives.”

Robby Poblete Foundation masks are available starting Monday via robbypobletefoundation.org.

Thank you: Times Herald

John Ton, Robby’s Arc. Photo courtesy of author.

According to the Gun Violence Archive, incidents involving firearms have been steadily increasing since 2014.¹ Widely covered in the mainstream press, mass shootings like the one that took place at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and murders of people of color, including Trayvon Martin, have motivated culture-shifting movements like Black Lives Matter and the National School Walkout, calling for anti-gun policy and systems change. These movements have revealed wide public support for gun control² by elevating the conversation in the public sphere, but we have yet to realize significant progress in developing legislation to make obtaining firearms in the United States more difficult. Moreover, even when legislation finally passes (and it will), regulations only address one part of a much larger epidemic of violence and injustice — one that demands healing, creating new pathways of opportunity, and building equity in the communities that have been most impacted by gun violence.

Meeting the challenges of the gun violence epidemic requires manifold solutions, addressing root causes as well as symptoms at both the community and policy levels. This starts with changing the way people talk about gun violence, heal from it, and build equity in their communities, rather than fixating on intractable discussions about Second Amendment rights and the tragedy of death tolls.³ The Robby Poblete Foundation (RPF) is betting on one increasingly effective, and perhaps surprising, strategy to get there: art.

Why Art?

On September 21, 2014, Robby Poblete, son of memoirist and journalist Pati Navalta Poblete, was killed by gun violence in broad daylight at a busy intersection in Vallejo, California. He was twenty-three years old at the time, and had just begun working in the welding shop of a biotech company, where he was learning the trade and on track to becoming a full-time employee. The firearm used to end his life was obtained illegally, and then resold on the streets.

The City of Vallejo, where two generations of Poblete’s family have lived, has seen a steady rise in crime- and gun-related violence since 1993, when the US Department of Defense recommended the closure of Mare Island; prior to this, the naval shipyard was the economic epicenter of the city. At its peak in the mid-1980s, the shipyard employed approximately ten thousand people and contributed $500 million to Vallejo’s annual economy. Faced with the news of a sudden loss of jobs and opportunities, the city’s homicide rate tripled to a record thirty in 1994. At the time, Vallejo’s population was 113,129. The only other city of comparable population with a higher homicide rate was Inglewood, adjacent to South Central Los Angeles, with forty-nine slayings. In the wake of the closure, Vallejo continued to struggle, and in 2008 became the largest city in America to declare bankruptcy. This meant cuts — most notably in the Vallejo Police Department, leading to more crime and a lack of resources and manpower to handle it. The city eventually slashed 33% of its police force. In 2013, there were twenty-four homicides in Vallejo, marking the highest number of homicides the city had seen since that record year in 1994. In 2014, there were eighteen homicides. Robby Poblete was number fourteen.

Pati Navalta Poblete recounted the journey of her grief over the loss of her son in a memoir titled A Better Place, published in 2018. As an artist herself — of the written word — Poblete understood that the act of writing held the potential to transform her unthinkable pain into something else. So when she began writing her story in 2016, she hoped it might be helpful to others grieving and healing from the impact of gun violence in their lives. It was around this idea of transformation of grief, of guns, of individual lives, and of whole communities — with art as the catalyst — that the Robby Poblete Foundation (RPF) was born.

Founded in 2017 by Pati Poblete, RPF’s three integrated programs — Gun Buybacks, the Art of Peace, and Works In Progress — aim to create safer communities by getting unwanted guns off the streets and transforming them into weapons of hope and opportunity. Beginning with a buyback, RPF pays community members for their unwanted weapons, then provides stipends to artists, trade professionals, second-chancers, and youth with limited opportunities in order to transform the decommissioned gun parts into artworks. The works of art are then publicly exhibited in large-scale community events, and sold to support future buybacks. While there are many community-based and place-based organizations that do buybacks, and others that transform decommissioned guns, and still others that create pathways to employment, RPF is unique in doing all three. “To be able to see people’s lives change because of what we are doing,” Poblete says, “is bittersweet because none of this would happen if my son was still here, and yet we do it in his name and that is the most hopeful thing for me.”

In less than three years since its founding, RPF’s programs have tracked significant success, collecting nearly nine hundred guns, supporting the creation of more than thirty-five works of art exhibited in five cities, hosting ten career fairs and workshops, and providing $20,000 in scholarships for apprenticeship programs. But it’s the Art of Peace exhibitions that have garnered the most attention in neighboring communities, the local press, and cities across the country. While the Foundation was initially focused on executing its programs in the City of Vallejo in Solano County, requests to replicate the Art of Peace program have come from many other Bay Area counties, including Napa, San Francisco, Marin, and Alameda, as well as cities across the country, including Santa Rosa, California, El Paso, Texas, and Atlanta and Augusta, Georgia.

The following sections describe each of RPF’s three programs, examine how they work together, and note the specific strategies that enable their success.

Gun Buybacks

RPF’s core mission is to get unwanted guns out of circulation through annual gun buyback programs. The primary objective of the buyback program is to reduce gun violence in the community by both promoting gun owner safety and preventing unwanted guns from falling into the wrong hands. The first step to hosting a gun buyback is to build relationships with law enforcement agencies, to both learn about the local regulations around collecting and decommissioning weapons and to ensure day-of law enforcement participation. Each buyback event requires monthly meetings with stakeholders to coordinate day-of logistics, acquire permits, purchase gift cards (which are distributed in exchange for surrendered firearms) and promote the event, which at its core must be a “no questions asked” weapons return. RPF also distributes free gun locks to owners during these events.

While the buybacks are always focused on a specific community, some individuals will travel from other municipalities to return their weapons as part of the local buyback, in the absence of a buyback opportunity in their region. Advertisement for every buyback should be focused locally, with press releases issued both before and after the event in partnership with the local Police Department to help raise awareness about the buyback, as well as offer information on gun safety to the locality.

However, it is not easy to host a buyback. Some municipalities do not allow them, and there can be negative backlash from pro-gun individuals and organizations. For RPF, this is where focusing on the Art of Peace can begin to mitigate some of that backlash, by inviting greater participation in buyback events from individuals who may be squeamish about relinquishing weapons to law enforcement agencies, but who are intrigued by the concept of transforming unwanted weapons into art. Beginning with the buybacks, Art of Peace operates as a pathway for gun owners and pro-gun individuals to be engaged in the larger conversation around gun safety and gun violence.

Because of the success of RPF’s gun buybacks, in 2018, Poblete was invited to speak at the King Center’s fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. The King Center invited a group of young men, ranging from 11–14 years old and primarily African American, to plant fifty trees throughout Atlanta to honor Dr. King — as part of the celebration, RPF coordinated with the Oakland-based organization Lead to Life to transform guns collected at a San Francisco buyback into fifty shovels to be used at the event. Each young man was asked about their experience with gun violence, and every single one shared a story of having watched someone get shot right in front of them. The event garnered significant attention in Georgia, which resulted in RPF receiving a request of support from the City of Augusta to host a buyback. Since Georgia is a conservative state, Augusta had not previously been able to gain community support for a buyback, but with RPF’s partnership — which included the guarantee of an Augusta-based Art of Peace exhibit displaying the transformed weapons — they received the green light to launch the buyback.

Gaige Qualmann, Pati Poblete on KPIX local news. Photo courtesy of author.

Art of Peace

While Poblete knew art would play a role in the programs, she never imagined it would be the glue that held the entire endeavor together. “When I designed the Foundation, I underestimated that program the most,” Poblete says of Art of Peace. “But what it has done is enable conversations about gun violence in a non-political way. Any time I have tried to bring up gun violence without art, it is purely a political issue. Art of Peace touches people emotionally, which enables them to have an intellectual conversation about it.”

RPF’s Art of Peace program uses the decommissioned gun parts collected at the buybacks as material for artists to create works that raise awareness about gun violence. Two of the most surprising things learned in the process of organizing the first Art of Peace exhibit in Vallejo were that the scourge of gun violence directly touches more people than one might imagine, and that there are warehouses of decommissioned weapons collected by law enforcement agencies in many cities simply waiting to be destroyed. In addition to the materials gathered at buybacks, RPF obtains these additional confiscated firearms to present to artists.

Partnering with art organizations, artist communities, and schools, RPF forms a local Art of Peace committee to request a call for proposals, review and select artists, identify a location for the public exhibit, and launch the Art of Peace event. Every Art of Peace exhibition is open to the broader community, and provides an opportunity for the artists to meet with the public and share their art and their stories around creating the pieces, which works to deepen awareness of the impact of gun violence. Every artist engaged to date — who together have created more than thirty-five pieces displayed in five exhibits — has been personally impacted by gun violence.

The Art of Peace exhibition which took place at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) in July 2019 was the largest yet, and its opening was attended by more than five hundred guests. The exhibit was the result of a partnership between RPF and United Playaz, a longtime community-based anti-violence organization based in San Francisco. The two groups held a gun buyback in San Francisco and partnered with the beloved YBCA community to develop the exhibit, which will have a second opening at the State Building in San Francisco. The exhibit garnered so much attention that cities recently affected by mass shootings — specifically El Paso, Texas and Santa Rosa, California — have requested that RPF partner with them to host gun buybacks and Art of Peace exhibits to help bring the community together to heal from these tragedies, and begin to find solutions to the challenges gun violence presents.

Participating artists receive a stipend along with the materials to create their artworks, and then donate the works back to the Foundation for sale. Revenue from the sale of the art fuels future buybacks. All the art from the inaugural Art of Peace exhibit in Vallejo has been sold, as well as all the art from the Augusta, Georgia exhibit. Once the San Francisco Art of Peace completes its exhibition at the State Building, it will go to auction; two of the pieces already have $20,000 minimum bid offers. “Our events are the only ones that bring together labor unions and artists, law enforcement and community organizations, and so many other groups that don’t usually have cause to interact,” says Poblete. “This was intentional and is very unique to RPF. We can’t have Art of Peace without the buyback. We can’t have the buyback unless we sell the art to hold the next buyback. It is designed to support itself.”

Part of that original design also includes Works in Progress, which was developed primarily because of Poblete’s son, Robby, who had just begun working in a welding shop and was on track to becoming a full-time employee when he died. In the first 18 months of the Foundation, however, the Works In Progress program still felt like an outlier to Poblete. It was clearly related to the other two programs, given that the tools and materials the artists worked with were metal and wood, requiring welding, carpentry, and other trade skills. However, it wasn’t yet seamlessly integrated, a fact that bothered Poblete — until she saw a call for grant proposals from the California Arts Council to support re-entry programs through art.

Natasha McCray Zolp and Shameel Ali, Resurrection. Photo courtesy of author.

Works In Progress

Working with local unions, workforce development agencies, and county offices of education, RPF helps raise awareness among high school students, young adults, and those in need of a second chance about opportunities in skilled trades. Trades education and skill building is becoming scarce in high school curricula, and many young adults are uninformed about the opportunities in their communities. To bridge that gap, RPF attends job fairs and hosts bus tours that bring those interested in these opportunities to informational meetings. RPF also provides scholarships for those who have been accepted to an apprenticeship program, but cannot cover the associated costs for work boots, tools, books, and other fees, and also supports transportation costs. Apprenticeship programs include training in commercial driving; electrical, sheet metal, and pipefitting trades; operational engineering; ironwork; carpentry, and more.

“When I looked at the four men who were charged in Robby’s killing,” Poblete says, “I noticed they had been in and out of the correctional system since they had been juveniles. And I started wondering if they had just been given an opportunity or had been given a sense of future…no one grows up thinking ‘I want to kill someone or rob someone.’ When they do turn to that life, it’s mostly because they see no other options.” For Poblete and RPF, while removing a weapon from a community and transforming it into art was generative and healing, it was not addressing the primary question about why a person reaches for a gun in the first place. It was clear to RPF that a lack of opportunity and specific job skills were a primary barrier for these, and so many other, young Vallejo men. Thus, a focus on young people as well as second-chancers was critical, to both reduce recidivism rates and, hopefully, present an achievable alternative early enough to provide opportunity and a non-violent pathway to adulthood. Since its inception in 2017, the Works In Progress program participants have all become a part of the RPF community, attending the Art of Peace exhibits and becoming volunteers.

The grant from the California Arts Council will finally bring all three programs together seamlessly. Instead of an open call for artist proposals, the gun parts acquired in the next buyback will be distributed to second-chancers (four have signed up to-date, some of whom have been convicted of gun-related crimes themselves). Each participant will be partnered with a trades mentor and artist to transform the materials into an artwork, while learning key skills like carpentry, welding, and more. While not all participants are artists, they all have a story to tell, and will work with the artists to turn their stories into designs. Once the works have been created and the Art of Peace exhibition is launched, any participant who expresses a desire to continue working in the trades will be given an apprenticeship scholarship to a training program on a full-time employment track. In less than three years since its founding, RPF has figured out a successful way to build community and equity, and heal from gun violence — and it all centers around art.

The Power of One Is the Power of Many

It is often said that a cause needs a champion. People have a deep understanding of the issues and challenges their communities face, but often lack the solutions and opportunities to address them. With Poblete as its founder, executive director, and champion, the success of RPF can be attributed to the broad community of people living in Vallejo and beyond who have partnered with the organization and participated in its programs.

“I believe the only reason we have been as impactful as we have been in less than three years is because of our partnerships,” Poblete says. “These are partnerships not only with community leaders. Each one of our programs necessitates that we partner with different sectors within the community.” Every gun buyback requires partnership and coordination with local law enforcement and city officials. Every Art of Peace launch demands partnership with local art organizations, artist communities, colleges, and high schools. For every Works In Progress activity, RPF partners with local unions, apprenticeship programs, small businesses, and workforce development groups. Relationship-building and community organizing have been the single most important strategies in ensuring the success of all three programs. The only way to build lasting relationships is by continually meeting with stakeholders, face-to-face, to gain trust through consistency.

In its inaugural year, RPF had no budget. As its founder and primary volunteer, Poblete — while also working full time — met with more than thirty stakeholders in Vallejo, including business owners, politicians, law enforcement, union leaders, service clubs including the Soroptimists and Knights of Columbus, correctional officers, school administrators, and potential program donors. With deep ties to the Filipinx community, Poblete also hosted gatherings that brought volunteers of all ages together, enabling her to tap into the energy and creativity of the youngest members of the community. When it came time to raise funds for the first gun buyback, the community she had begun to build showed up to participate in fun runs, golf tournaments, and other community-based fundraising efforts. As the number of participants at these events grew, local banks and healthcare organizations provided modest sponsorship support for additional events.

Poblete was creating not simply a volunteer-run organization, but an engaged community, prepared to show up to support any event. In its second year, RPF received a multiyear gift from the California Wellness Foundation that increased its budget to $50,000 annually, enabling RPF to hire a part-time contractor to support communications (primarily social media and website) and volunteer coordination efforts, and launch its Art of Peace and Works In Progress programs. “I will never again underestimate the power of one,” Poblete says of her continued efforts. “Because I have seen firsthand what one grieving mother can do.”

Clody Cates and Gaige Qualmann, Return to Nature. Photo courtesy of author.

Looking Ahead

Art of Peace has undoubtedly had the greatest impact in the community, drawing people to the exhibitions and garnering national media attention. The program has also resulted in requests from municipalities around the country to host buybacks and Art of Peace exhibitions to promote community engagement, awareness around gun violence, and healing from tragedy. RPF will continue to run its three integrated programs in Vallejo and neighboring cities, and is looking for ways to meet the demands for replication popping up around the country. “What I didn’t expect,” says Poblete, “is that there is a desire from communities to have something like this and they just don’t know how. We can give them the blueprint and kit to do it.”

While each municipality is unique, there are a number of basic strategies and steps that RPF can share to shorten the community- and relationship-building ramp-up leading to an inaugural buyback and Art of Peace exhibit. To that end, RPF is developing a toolkit that contains official branded Art of Peace col- lateral alongside step-by-step information for executing the program. The goal is to create a guide that ensures that the integrity of the program — its mission, values, and original philosophy around healing and awareness — remains intact. Licensing the branded program to interested municipalities may also be a way to build sustainability into the replication and scaling effort.

“The biggest draw,” Poblete says, “has been the three programs. Some people warned me that it was too much, and that donors would think that we were all over the place. But what donors are telling us is that we are addressing both the violence, and its cause: lack of opportunity. The fact that we are looking at it in totality, with the driving force of art at the center, is what makes it successful.”

Melissa Fondakowski is director of Development and Grants at The Redford Center. She is a volunteer for the Robby Poblete Foundation and also writes for San Francisco Magazine.

Thank you: Grantmakers In The Arts

Losing a child can, for some, bring a lifetime of mourning. Simply doing the little things to get through each day—preparing meals, paying bills, even watching TV—becomes an enormous accomplishment.

But the murder of Robby Poblete, who was gunned down at an intersection in Vallejo, Calif., in 2014, brought more than grief to Poblete’s mother, Pati Navalta. It brought a deep desire to change things.

Navalta, a Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist, opted to turn the loss of her son into a positive contribution. The result was The Robby Poblete Foundation, a nonprofit that buys back firearms and turns them into artwork, delivering a powerful message about the triumph of beauty over pain, and one that’s building steam.

Over the past five years, the foundation’s mission — which beyond the gun buyback and art programs, includes vocational training aimed at helping young men transition into gainful employment — has impacted communities all over California, spread to Augusta, Ga., and has attracted the attention of the United Nations. In addition to the gun buyback and It’s impossible to compute how many lives the nonprofit has saved by getting guns off the streets, but there’s clearly no end to the desire to save lives.

Navalta knew that in order for the foundation to achieve its potential, it would have to get more sophisticated with its operations. As it grew, adding partnerships with more law enforcement agencies, arts organizations and schools, managing operations on Excel and Google Docs wasn’t sustainable.

Wanted: More Formal System

“We were growing to the point where it wasn’t efficient for us to work in all these systems,” said Navalta. “Plus, we were getting lots of grants and we needed a more formalized system for processing them.”

Navalta wanted the foundation to be able to track its budget in real time so that it could provide detailed reports to donors. She also wanted to be able to manage its programs separately, tracking partners and beneficiaries in each program individually.

Her staff started recommending solutions, but there was really only one choice as far as Navalta was concerned: NetSuite, where she had once been an employee following her son’s death. Shortly after leaving her job there in 2018, Navalta and the foundation selected NetSuite and spent five months deploying it, going live in January 2019.

From the word go, NetSuite has been transformational for the nonprofit. It’s able to collaborate with law enforcement to track the types of firearms it buys back; provide detailed data about the use of donated funds; track scholarship applicants until they’re placed in a job or apprenticeship.

Not that it was always obvious how to accomplish these things. The foundation leaned on NetSuite’s Social Impact team — not only to receive discounted software, but to get 1:1 support from the Suite Capacity team on transferring their data into NetSuite most effectively. The Suite Capacity team helps our NetSuite nonprofit customers with training and resources on how to best use the system to drive greater impact.

“We loved that we were able to tell them our very specific needs, and they were able to hone in and give us a workaround or tailor things to our specific needs,” said Navalta.

Growing Into NetSuite

Those needs have evolved. For instance, the foundation launched with one large unrestricted grant, but now it’s receiving a lot of smaller, restricted grants, which require total transparency into how those funds are used.

NetSuite also has helped in other fundamental ways: Whereas foundation employees used to rifle through piles of business cards looking for someone’s contact information, all of that is now entered immediately into NetSuite, enabling staff to quickly look up donors, partners and beneficiaries in an instant.

Having a system of record also has enabled one employee, whose job previously was simply to organize information, to shift to more valuable activities, such as recruiting applicants or speaking at high schools.

Naturally, Navalta has additional plans for NetSuite. For instance, she’d like to get her staff more training on the software, once the foundation determines what exactly it wants to be able to accomplish with the software.

But perhaps more immediate is the need to expand the foundation’s horizons. With Navalta getting calls from communities in other states, and the United Nations interested in the program, The Robby Poblete Foundation’s world is going to get bigger, and NetSuite figures prominently as the nonprofit contends with its growing footprint.

“How are we going to manage these requests from around the world? I think that will become more apparent,” said Navalta. “I definitely want to keep growing with NetSuite.”

Thank you: Netsuite

But like a phoenix, Navalta has risen to help carry on her son’s name.

The Robby Poblete Foundation partnered up with the Vallejo Police Department on Saturday for the third annual Solano County Gun Buyback at the Solano County Fairgrounds as part of National Gun Buy Pack Day. The Robby Poblete Foundation uses a phoenix for its logo.

“Today is always an emotional day,” said Navalta, the founder and executive director of the nonprofit organization. “Every time I set this up I wish I wasn’t doing it. Look, I love doing this but if my son was here this wouldn’t be happening and I wouldn’t be here. But the fact that I’m here helping save lives in his name means its not for nothing.”

At the time he was killed, Poblete was working at a biotech company where he was also learning how to weld. He was on the verge of becoming a full-time employee and was already making plans to build his own weld shop. The firearm used to end his life was obtained illegally, and then resold on the streets.

Navalta was happy with the turnout halfway through the day.

“I was honestly hoping to get 50 guns and in the first hour we had over 100 guns turned in,” Navalta said. “We’re up to 127 guns bought back and we still have two hours to go.”

In three years the Poblete Foundation has gotten over 400 guns out of circulation in Vallejo alone, as the foundation’s first gun buyback in 2017, held in partnership with the Eric Reyes Foundation and the Vallejo Police Department, yielded 180 weapons. In 2018, 115 more firearms were turned in.

Instead of using guns for violence, Navalta also hopes to turn the guns into pieces of art like some used for the foundation’s Art of Peace project. The most recent Art of Peace exhibit, in partnership with San Francisco-based nonprofit United Playaz, attracted 500 visitors to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Navalta said she has an idea for an art project she’d like to make herself, but was keeping those thoughts to herself for the time being.

Upon coming to McCormack Hall at the fairgrounds, gun owners were asked to store their unloaded firearms in their trunks before coming to the buyback. Up to $100 in gift cards were given for a rifle and shotgun, while $200 in gift cards were given out for each handgun and assault weapon, as classified by the State of California. Ammunition and other weapons such as throwing stars, butterfly knives, switchblades and brass knuckles were accepted, but no gift cards were given for these items. In three years the foundation had invested $60,000 in gun buy backs.

Vallejo Police Department Sgt. Jeff Tai said the majority of the guns that had been returned this year were handguns. The event was a “no-questions asked” buyback, so the few people turning in guns that this paper tried to interview responded kindly with “no comment.”

Rich Botello, a corporal with the Vallejo police and the evidence and property manager, mentioned that most people had no responses when turning their weapons over, but he did admit that some were very appreciative of the program and doing this service for them so they didn’t have to keep the weapons they didn’t want anymore in their home.”

Botello said that after the weapons were confirmed unloaded and safe, they were brought inside the hall. The weapons were then put in buckets and bins.

“At the end of the day after the final tally, the weapons are transported for evidence where they are checked into the databases to see whether they are stolen or not,” Botello said. “A stolen weapon, we might follow up on that, but other than that, because it’s anonymous, the weapons are destroyed.”

Tai also said that most people don’t explain why they are bringing in the guns, but the Vallejo police officer brought up a 2018 incident in which an assault weapon was brought in to the buyback that was the same type of weapon used in training for the police department.

“The man eventually shared the information about the gun,” Tai said. “He said he found out his son, who has schizophrenia, was keeping the gun. The man originally was afraid to do anything with it and wanted to dump it in a river, but instead he took it here. So you take the gun away from a person with a mental illness. And who knows who then finds it in the river. A lot of lives were potentially saved with him turning in that gun.”

That’s what Navalta said she saw when she looked at all the guns in the bins and buckets. See didn’t see weapons, she saw lives saved.

Navalta said that every day she wakes up and it’s hard knowing her son is gone, but the day had another meaning on Saturday as it was also the seventh anniversary of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting that occurred in Newtown, Conn. That day 20-year-old Adam Lanza shot and killed 26 people, including 20 children between the ages of  6 and 7 years old, and six adult staff members. Before driving to the school, he shot and killed his mother at their Newtown home. As first responders arrived at the school, Lanza committed suicide by shooting himself in the head.

The incident remains the deadliest mass shooting at either a primary or secondary school in U.S. history, the second-deadliest U.S. school shooting overall, and the fourth-deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.

“Any day for me is tough, every day is tough,” Navalta said. “But for me the Sandy Hook shooting is personal because I relate to all those parents. I know exactly what those 20 parents or so woke up to that day. I know what it’s like and I also know what it’s like to be parents and be attacked in social media.”

Navalta is speaking about how she still gets threats and attacks from people who do not want their guns taken away.

“Yeah it still happens a lot on social media,” Navalta added. “What these people don’t seem to understand is that this isn’t a political issue for me this is a human issue for me. This is not because I’m a Democrat or because I don’t like Republicans. I’m trying to create a space to service gun owners who no longer need these weapons. If they don’t want it anymore I’d rather them bring it here so it’s not used on the street.”

Thank you: Mercury News

The Art of Peace project comes out of another tragedy caused by gun violence: the death of Robby Poblete, who was killed in 2014 at a busy intersection in Vallejo.

The Robby Poblete Foundation was created by his mother, Pati Navalta, executive director of the foundation, after the death of her son. The foundation’s logo is a rising phoenix with its wings outstretched. It is an apt description of Navalta’s life.

 

Cpl. Matt Kamoda of the Vallejo Police Department carries a gun during a Solano County Gun Buyback event at the Solano County Fairgrounds in Vallejo, Saturday, Dec. 14, 2019. (Aaron Rosenblatt/Daily Republic)

“I really didn’t know if I was going to make it out of the fire,” she said.

Navalta did rise and in her sorrow created a lasting foundation whose impact will be felt for years to come.

“This is not a political issue for me, this is a human issue,” she said. “This is a way to safely get rid of guns.”

Navalta said she is conflicted about the Solano Fairgrounds hosting the gun buyback and then hosting a gun show, which is scheduled in a couple of weeks.

“I don’t know how I feel about that,” she said.

Navalta looked over the guns that had been taken in the morning and placed into large trash cans. She shook her head.

“I have this feeling when I look at this but I can’t say what it is,” she said.

The Vallejo Police Department directed the collection of guns, which were voluntarily given up by members of the community.

Navalta remembers an automatic rifle that was surrendered last year. A father said he found it in his schizophrenic son’s room. He considered throwing it into the river but then thought better of it because someone could have found it. He brought the gun to the buyback program instead.

“What was he going to do with the gun?” Navalta asked. “How many lives did we save by taking it off the streets?”

The foundation offered gift cards in exchange for the guns, ranging in value from $200 for handguns and assault rifles to $100 for long guns.

Rich Botello, evidence property manager for the Vallejo Police Department, said the nearly 130 guns were surrendered anonymously and would be taken to the evidence room later in the day, where they would be checked to see if they were stolen.

“Later, they will be broken down into scrap metal,” he said, “which is then used by the artists for the art project.”

Vallejo Police Sgt. Jeff Tai said that most people who brought the weapons in didn’t want them anymore.

“They get something – the gift cards – and the guns get turned into art,” he said. “It also gets guns off the streets.”

Tai said that responsible gun owners are not the problem.

Saturday was National Gun Buyback Day as well as the anniversary of the Sandy Hook massacre, which occurred Dec. 14, 2012, in Newtown, Connecticut, and left 26 people dead at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Twenty of those killed were young children ages 6 and 7. The other six were adult members of the school’s staff. The 20-year-old shooter had killed his mother that morning in their home, and killed himself at the school as police arrived at the scene.

“This is a way to get guns off the streets and in one less person’s hands,” Tai said.

Thank you: Daily Republic

But like a phoenix, Navalta has risen to help carry on her son’s name.

The Robby Poblete Foundation partnered up with the Vallejo Police Department on Saturday for the third annual Solano County Gun Buyback at the Solano County Fairgrounds as part of National Gun Buy Pack Day. The Robby Poblete Foundation uses a phoenix for its logo.

“Today is always an emotional day,” said Navalta, the founder and executive director of the nonprofit organization. “Every time I set this up I wish I wasn’t doing it. Look, I love doing this but if my son was here this wouldn’t be happening and I wouldn’t be here. But the fact that I’m here helping save lives in his name means its not for nothing.”

At the time he was killed, Poblete was working at a biotech company where he was also learning how to weld. He was on the verge of becoming a full-time employee and was already making plans to build his own weld shop. The firearm used to end his life was obtained illegally, and then resold on the streets.

Navalta was happy with the turnout halfway through the day.

“I was honestly hoping to get 50 guns and in the first hour we had over 100 guns turned in,” Navalta said. “We’re up to 127 guns bought back and we still have two hours to go.”

In three years the Poblete Foundation has gotten over 400 guns out of circulation in Vallejo alone, as the foundation’s first gun buyback in 2017, held in partnership with the Eric Reyes Foundation and the Vallejo Police Department, yielded 180 weapons. In 2018, 115 more firearms were turned in.

Instead of using guns for violence, Navalta also hopes to turn the guns into pieces of art like some used for the foundation’s Art of Peace project. The most recent Art of Peace exhibit, in partnership with San Francisco-based nonprofit United Playaz, attracted 500 visitors to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Navalta said she has an idea for an art project she’d like to make herself, but was keeping those thoughts to herself for the time being.

Upon coming to McCormack Hall at the fairgrounds, gun owners were asked to store their unloaded firearms in their trunks before coming to the buyback. Up to $100 in gift cards were given for a rifle and shotgun, while $200 in gift cards were given out for each handgun and assault weapon, as classified by the State of California. Ammunition and other weapons such as throwing stars, butterfly knives, switchblades and brass knuckles were accepted, but no gift cards were given for these items. In three years the foundation had invested $60,000 in gun buy backs.

Vallejo Police Department Sgt. Jeff Tai said the majority of the guns that had been returned this year were handguns. The event was a “no-questions asked” buyback, so the few people turning in guns that this paper tried to interview responded kindly with “no comment.”

Rich Botello, a corporal with the Vallejo police and the evidence and property manager, mentioned that most people had no responses when turning their weapons over, but he did admit that some were very appreciative of the program and doing this service for them so they didn’t have to keep the weapons they didn’t want anymore in their home.”

Botello said that after the weapons were confirmed unloaded and safe, they were brought inside the hall. The weapons were then put in buckets and bins.

“At the end of the day after the final tally, the weapons are transported for evidence where they are checked into the databases to see whether they are stolen or not,” Botello said. “A stolen weapon, we might follow up on that, but other than that, because it’s anonymous, the weapons are destroyed.”

Tai also said that most people don’t explain why they are bringing in the guns, but the Vallejo police officer brought up a 2018 incident in which an assault weapon was brought in to the buyback that was the same type of weapon used in training for the police department.

“The man eventually shared the information about the gun,” Tai said. “He said he found out his son, who has schizophrenia, was keeping the gun. The man originally was afraid to do anything with it and wanted to dump it in a river, but instead he took it here. So you take the gun away from a person with a mental illness. And who knows who then finds it in the river. A lot of lives were potentially saved with him turning in that gun.”

That’s what Navalta said she saw when she looked at all the guns in the bins and buckets. See didn’t see weapons, she saw lives saved.

Navalta said that every day she wakes up and it’s hard knowing her son is gone, but the day had another meaning on Saturday as it was also the seventh anniversary of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting that occurred in Newtown, Conn. That day 20-year-old Adam Lanza shot and killed 26 people, including 20 children between the ages of  6 and 7 years old, and six adult staff members. Before driving to the school, he shot and killed his mother at their Newtown home. As first responders arrived at the school, Lanza committed suicide by shooting himself in the head.

The incident remains the deadliest mass shooting at either a primary or secondary school in U.S. history, the second-deadliest U.S. school shooting overall, and the fourth-deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.

“Any day for me is tough, every day is tough,” Navalta said. “But for me the Sandy Hook shooting is personal because I relate to all those parents. I know exactly what those 20 parents or so woke up to that day. I know what it’s like and I also know what it’s like to be parents and be attacked in social media.”

Navalta is speaking about how she still gets threats and attacks from people who do not want their guns taken away.

“Yeah it still happens a lot on social media,” Navalta added. “What these people don’t seem to understand is that this isn’t a political issue for me this is a human issue for me. This is not because I’m a Democrat or because I don’t like Republicans. I’m trying to create a space to service gun owners who no longer need these weapons. If they don’t want it anymore I’d rather them bring it here so it’s not used on the street.”

Thank you: Times Herald