By Alaina Bookman | AL.com
Editor’s Note: In 2025, AL.com’s “Beyond the Violence” project, in partnership with The Birmingham Times, examines whether Birmingham can grow beyond its crime problem and become safer, healthier and happier.
RESTORE, a Birmingham juvenile re-entry program, is saving and transforming young people’s lives every day.
Carrie Buntain, executive director of RESTORE, said the program needs additional funding to expand and continue changing those young lives.
After a year of record breaking homicides, local leaders are working to make Birmingham residents safer and happier. The juvenile re-entry program has proven to be an example of a successful violence prevention tactic that helps put young people on better paths. The question remains: Will city officials help to expand RESTORE as Birmingham grapples with an ongoing homicide crisis?
“Those are lives that could have gone completely differently…It gives me goosebumps. It’s taken a while to see that impact, because we’re starting with some kids who don’t even know how to correctly sign their name, who are justice impacted, and don’t have a state ID to now really focusing on getting them involved in the workforce and making them a productive community member and showing them their potential for incredible self-sufficiency,” Buntain said.
In 2023, RESTORE launched with the goal of helping young people and their families impacted by the juvenile justice system. By offering tailored support, advocates say, they can intervene in cycles of crime and help more young people make positive life choices.
In two years, the program has blossomed, expanding to support even more young people and their families.
“We really try to focus heavily on what the whole family’s needs are and make sure those are met. A strengthened family unit serves to strengthen our kids too,” Buntain said.
In this year’s first quarter, RESTORE has already served 98 active clients and 344 young people have attended workshops. Buntain says the program is on track to serve more than 400 young people this year.
Buntain said 19 participants have graduated with their high school diploma, GED or a certification.
One client came into the RESTORE program as a teen mom struggling with her foster care placement. She left the program with her high school diploma and is now working to become a certified nursing assistant.
Since RESTORE’s inception, the number of Jefferson County youth ages 13-22 years old who were charged with murder decreased by 80%, and homicide victims in the same age group dropped by 61%.
“I thank the mayor and the city council for their support, because without their support, we would have zero funding. But we started this program in 2023 with the expectation of serving 120 clients. We ended up serving 249 but the original funding of $225,000 has not changed,” Buntain told AL.com.
“We have such a proven and effective program, our struggle really just comes down to the fact that our funding doesn’t match the need that’s obvious. And so this year, we look forward to more support from the city and more support from the community.”
The RESTORE Impact: ‘We’re saving lives’
Young men file into the RESTORE workshop, sitting around a large wooden table.
Some are silly and loud, while others sit quietly, head down, hands in their pockets. Some are middle school age, most are teens. Some of the young men who attend the workshops are no longer involved in family court or juvenile detention. Some have lost loved ones to gun violence and wear their loved ones’ faces on their chains. They come from different sides of town.
One thing that unites them, is that they come to RESTORE because they want to.
Twice a week, RESTORE participants diligently attend the workshops to talk “man business” with the program coordinators.
During a January workshop, RESTORE Program Manager Antski Williams and Program Coordinator Carmone Owens took turns talking to the young men about the importance of making good decisions.
Williams leads the workshops for the young men. Before the session starts, he invites them to stand up and recite a pledge: “I stand on man business. I stand on self-discipline. I stand on self-respect. I stand on self-accountability. I stand on self-control. I stand on self-observation. I stand on man business.”
In the beginning, many of the participants quietly mumble the pledge.
As the workshop progresses, the young men flip through the RESTORE curriculum workbook, reading along with their mentors about goal setting, accountability, healthy relationships, conflict resolution and how to express their emotions.
Williams and Owens speak with conviction, using their own experiences to set the young men on better paths. They make a point to know all of their participants’ names and remind them that the workshops are a safe space to express themselves.
By the time the workshop is over and the young men recite the pledge to leave, they all say the words loudly and with pride, their entire demeanor having changed in the span of one hour. The young men leave with their shoulders squared and smiles on their faces.
Some of the RESTORE participants said Williams and Owens are like uncles and even father figures. When the workshop ends, Owens can be found standing at the door sending some of the young men off with a hug and an ‘I love you.’
Asked what they think would happen if the RESTORE program no longer existed, one participant responded, “My honest opinion, if this program didn’t exist anymore, there would be a lot of bad stuff happening, people relapsing for real. They’d go back to doing the same stuff they’d been doing. If they don’t have nobody putting good news in their ear, they’d probably be out here killing, catching murders.”
One of the participants said the program coordinators treat him fairly, treatment he said he is not accustomed to receiving from other authority figures.
Another participant said the program has helped him become a man.
Multiple participants said that before the program, they were walking down a bad path, but RESTORE set them on the right one.
“We’re saving lives,” Williams told AL.com in November. “That helps us work on prevention because for two hours, twice a week, every week, they are able to put down their street beef until they change the politics in the street. That means that they’re not out there dying or killing. We touch their lives everyday. We’re restoring lives, restoring communities. That’s a life saved.”
What is the city doing to expand youth violence intervention programs? Additional funding is still needed.
Mayor Randall Woodfin formed an independent Crime Commission in October 2024, made up of residents and leaders from business, community, criminal justice, healthcare and non-profit sectors to identify strategies to address the city’s high homicide rate.
In December, the Birmingham city council approved $2 million to support the Mayor’s Office of Community Safety Initiatives strategy.
The Commission’s report, published in January, is the most recent step in the effort to combat gun violence in Birmingham.
The report called for a multi-faceted crime-fighting strategy including recommendations to “expand mentorship, after-school programs, and recreational opportunities to divert youth from criminal behavior and foster positive development [and] increase funding and expansion of the RESTORE juvenile re-entry program.”
Woodfin declined an interview with AL.com but the city of Birmingham released a statement with an update on the progress of implementing the report’s recommendations.
Woodfin committed to providing status updates throughout the process of implementation. Of 82 recommendations made by the commission, 42 recommendations are in the planning or pre-launch stage.
“Overall, I am pleased with the cadence we have established to take steps to put these recommendations into practice.” Woodfin said in the statement.
The updated report indicated that additional funding for expanding RESTORE was completed and supported by a Department of Justice grant.
The problem is that the federal grant is reimbursement-style for $443,407.20. RESTORE does not currently have the funding to get reimbursed because the city funding, $225,000, does not match the federal allocations.
RESTORE would still need additional financial support from the city.
“We did get the RESTORE federal expansion grant, which has allowed us to add more coordinators. But the amount of funding that we have hasn’t grown enough to meet the capacity that we have,” Buntain said. “I wish that when the city budget was passed, that we had been included.”
The report also states that additional funding for RESTORE, and youth violence prevention programs like it, is in the “in progress stage.” Buntain has not yet heard from the city about the possibility of additional city funds so far this year.
“Our numbers just continue to grow. The program just continues to grow. The funding just doesn’t continue to grow with it. The support of the mayor, the support of the community is really what is going to launch us to the next level,” Buntain said.
“We are so resourceful. I can’t imagine what we could do with $1 million. The possibilities are limitless. We could hire more coordinators. We could get more kids off the streets. We could reach out and serve more of our youth.”
