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Aqeela Sherrills is the youngest of 10 siblings raised in the Jordan Downs Housing Projects in Watts, California. At only 34 years old, Aqeela stands out as a guiding force in the re-development of the Watts community with the goal of making it a national model for positive growth and social change.
In 1989, after seeing 13 of his friends killed in the bloody gang war that was destroying his community, Aqeela was inspired with a vision to create peace in his neighborhood. In 1992, after laying years of ground work, Aqeela and his brother Daude successfully bought the neighborhood gangs together for the signing of the "Peace Treaty" between the Bloods and the Crips in Watts.
In 1999, Aqeela and his brother establish the Community Self Determination Institute (CSDI), a social-profit agency dedicated to the transformation of the Watts community.
CSDI has managed over $3 million in contract with the City, County and State of California and has had upwards of 80 staff in Los Angeles and is one of the primary reasons that the peace settlement in Watts has had a lasting and binding effect and is now being emulated in other neighborhoods throughout Southern California. "Watts is the catalyst for the next major peace movement in this country” and CSDI is a vehicle for that change.
On January 10, 2004, Aqeela’s oldest son Terrell was murdered while home from his first semester of college. Although he died a violent death, “it’s not about who killed him, but the attitude of the culture, a lack of reverence for life that killed him”, said Aqeela. “I am not surrendering his life to death, but reclaiming it and giving it new meaning. It is my prayer that, in remembrance of Terrell, each life be lived to its fullest and each dream be realized, for Terrell’s life and death offers to us strength to go beyond the fear and doubt and hopelessness of the world and live into the eternal truth of the power of the resurrection”.
In March of 2005, Aqeela fulfilled a life long dream of traveling around the world and visiting sacred places on the planet that included, The Pyramids in Mexico, Machu Pichu, Angkor Wat, Elmina’s Castle in Ghana, The Pyramids in Egypt, The Port of Salvador, Brazil, The River Jordan, Petra and many monasteries in Southeast Europe. Leaving the States with the idea of returning an launching what he believes to be the next major peace movement in this country, The Reverence Movement.
Aqeela speaks and consults nationally and internationally on violence intervention and prevention strategies and is the Principal of The Reverence Project, a multi-tiered consultant company focused on shifting world wide imagination by instituting a practice of authentic exploration of the wounds in the personal life as a means of accesses the gift of who we are by not defining ourselves as our experiences.
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