Naperville resident and civil rights attorney Qasim Rashid said he was 16 years old in 1999 when the Columbine High School mass shooting took over a dozen lives. At the time, Rashid said he thought something like it would never happen again.

“That’s kind of what we all thought; it was a one-time thing,” Rashid said to a group of youth and adults at a downtown advertising agency last week. “(We thought) the folks in power are smart enough to figure out how to make sure this doesn’t happen again. Obviously, we were horribly wrong.”

Twenty-six years later, dozens from Chicago’s youth organizations came together to pitch social media campaigns to judges including Rashid — with backgrounds in education, public safety and social media — in an attempt to get one placed in a national promotion t

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