By Jennifer Porter Gore
Overview: When people come into the vibrant sunlit room in the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia, Chantay Love wants people to feel something many of them haven’t felt in a long time: joy.
(WIB) – When clients enter the vibrant, sunlit room of her organization’s headquarters in Philadelphia’s Germantown neighborhood, Chantay Love wants them to feel something most of them haven’t felt in a long time: joy.
Carefully curated and expertly designed, the space carries both memory and mission. Using color and texture, it is intended to evoke feelings of comfort and security. But it also represents the growth and expansion of the EMIR Healing Center, a nonprofit that advocates for and supports people devastated by the homicide of a loved one.
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Love, EMIR’s president and co-founder, says the new center’s look and feel is not just cosmetic but also strategic. She sees it as a way to communicate to her clients — many of whom are Black and from low-income communities, like her — that they matter, they deserve comfort, and that they can help end the scourge of deadly crime.
“If I can change the environment, I can stop violence,” she said. “This is a piece of that.”
EMIR is set to open two new Healing Centers in Germantown and in North Philadelphia on April 15. The openings are important milestones for the organization, launched 26 years ago after Love’s brother was brutally murdered. Along with realizing her vision for how healing spaces for loved ones of crime victims should look and feel, the new healing centers also mark EMIR’s expanded footprint, increased staff, and broader range of services.
Though her organization’s name honors Greene, Love also made his name an acronym: “EMIR stands for ‘Every Murder Is Real.’” Besides doubling as a mission statement, the slogan underscores Love’s goal of uplifting the families of the mostly young Black men who die from violence.
“We’ve witnessed how homicide occurs and how it rips not only through families, but through communities and entire cities,” she says. “It’s real loss, it’s real pain, and it’s real tragedy.”
‘We Decided to Just Serve’
On March 26, 1997, Emir Peter Greene, just 20 years old, was shot seven times in the back in the 5200 block of Rubicam St. in the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia. Growing up in the city’s Abbottsford housing projects, Chauntay Love, as well as her sisters and her brother, had been exposed to violence, but losing her brother in that manner was devastating.
In the aftermath of his killing, Love says, “We were trying to get help,” but authorities were less than compassionate, hinting that her brother was involved in criminal activity. “We were getting [answers] like, ‘Well, your brother was probably in the lifestyle, so he caused his own death,’” she says.
Pennsylvania law allowed the state to offer financial assistance to families who couldn’t afford the thousands of dollars it costs to bury a loved one. But Love says at the time that authorities could deny assistance if they believed the victim’s behavior led to their death; such was the case with her brother.
A nonprofit organization honoring homicide victims added insult to injury, Love says, when it declined to include her brother in a public memorial project.
“They said, ‘We can’t display your loved one because we only deal with innocent deaths,’” Love says. The comment was just one example of what she calls “a hierarchy in murder”: the homicide victims that matter most are affluent, white, or both.
“If you were Black or brown, [people think] you might have been doing something to deserve to die,” regardless of a family’s circumstances, she says. “So imagine: a family lives in a neighborhood that’s infested with drugs and they’re poor. Now they have the expense of a funeral bill and they’re also trying to eat.”
Then, when the man who killed her brother was arrested, Love was forced to process difficult emotions, like anger and grief. Ironically, her mother was a social worker in the city’s jail. The family was able to get grief counseling, but even then, they could see the system’s shortcomings.
That’s when Love, her mother and sisters created EMIR Healing Center with a simple but radical premise, Love says: “What if I leave judgment to a higher power and just serve?”
Over the years, the organization has combined trauma counseling for relatives of homicide victims with social support and advocacy: pushing for policy changes, intervening with employers to extend bereavement time, and working with schools to keep grieving students from being disciplined for behavior rooted in loss.
“When your child is ripped away from you, [families] need time,” Love said. “We advocate for employees. We advocate for schools. If a young person is activated by their loss, we can’t punish them. They’re grieving.”
Over the years, EMIR’s reputation has grown to the point that it is often among the first groups called after a homicide rocks a school or community. Love cites a statistic: the murder of a single loved one affects at least 100 people in a community — from classmates and teachers to neighbors, store owners, and faith leaders.
“At EMIR, we say we’re stopping the bullet from traveling” from the victim through the community, she says. “Even though the person who is murdered is gone, if no support is there, it travels through the family, through the community, through the school. It slowly kills them off.”
Designing for Joy
EMIR has grown from a handful of volunteers to 12 full-time trauma support coordinators and 18 counselors and therapists — growth that required a larger physical space. Love knew the new centers must be spaces where people could be vulnerable but also feel their own strength. But she also wanted them to be joyful.
“People could see it and say, ‘Oh, this is like an oasis,’” Love says. “[So] I knew the new space needed to have something. I just did not know what.”
Enter Kia Weatherspoon, founder and president of Determined by Design. Her Washington, D.C.-based interior design firm specializes in what she calls “design equity,” providing services for affordable, low-income housing, as well as small business owners and other clients with modest budgets.
“We make interior design accessible for everyone, and we use empathy as the lens to every project that we take on,” she says. Her own experiences, Weatherspoon adds, help bring empathy to the forefront.
For Weatherspoon, design is personal. She recalls visiting her brother in prison and feeling “so much anger” because of his living conditions. As a military veteran who was deployed overseas after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Witherspoon recalls hanging sheets in a tent to create a small private space — her first experience with the basic elements of design.
“And I bawled like a baby for 15 minutes,” she says.
The takeaway was that “space matters” — especially for people who inhabit environments that aren’t designed with their comfort in mind.
In EMIR’s new center, that translates into modular sofas arranged along the perimeter of large group therapy rooms, colorful spaces, acoustical privacy, commercial-grade furnishings built for longevity, and layered lighting from floor and table lamps to soften the space.
“Color is joy,” she said. “Softness. Comfort. I want people to feel joy, safe, vibrancy — like they can have a place of solace when everything else feels heavy
and they’re drowning.”
“We wanted everything to feel soft,” Weatherspoon said. “If I just need to sit cross-legged and hold myself and rock, I can do that.”
Her firm has also launched a social impact campaign to help fund the project, securing in-kind donations and deep discounts from commercial manufacturers while extending its own trade discounts to stretch EMIR’s budget.
“If we are truly saying the power of design can change people’s lives, it can heal people, then we need to be able to meet them where they are,” Weatherspoon said.
She sees generational impact in the walls, colors and textures of the new space.
“If you don’t feel it, you won’t fight for it,” she said. “Interior design is the greatest form of empathy in practice — if you choose it.”
Rising Need in Uncertain Times
The expansion comes amid growing demand. Love said she could “almost pick the date” last November when ICE Agents detained roughly 90 people at the city’s courthouse. Families who had already moved through one of their healing programs began returning.
“We’re seeing the levels of pain elevated, the level of being unsafe,” she said. “We have so many people that are so scared their loved one is going to be snatched off the street.”
“We’re almost trying to save a race of people,” Love said. “People don’t realize the pain and devastation that’s living in families.”