I got a call from a friend named Foundation One the other day. He wanted to meet with me and it was important, he said.

So I met him at his business, the Unity Barber Shop on Pontiac Street, and as we walked down the sidewalk he handed me a piece of folded paper.

“Do you know what that is?” he asked.

I unfolded it as we walked. It was an 18-inch-long outline of a human. You could call it a paper doll. Someone later told me it looked like a gingerbread man.

Foundation then opened a thick scrapbook he keeps, filled with copies of newspaper articles about crime and killings and shootings and stabbings in Fort Wayne.

He flipped through the pages until he found the article he wanted. It was a list of killings in Fort Wayne, year by year, going back to 1980. Some years there were only a dozen or so killings. Other years, especially in the 1990s, there were more than 40.

Foundation had added up the numbers. He showed it to me. Almost 800; 773 to be exact, and that might not count some recent homicides.

For the past few years, Foundation has been campaigning against the unrelenting flow of killings in the city, most of which have happened in his neighborhood, on the southeast side.

He talks about the mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters and children left behind, the damaged and ruined lives that result on both the giving and receiving end of bullets and other attacks. He’s urged people to think before they act and learn to control their anger.

But the killings and the shootings continue, and they can happen anywhere. A couple of years ago, the night before Thanksgiving, a man walked into Foundation’s crowded barbershop and opened fire on a man waiting to get his hair cut.

Foundation continues to preach his lectures of self- control and self-respect and the true meaning of being a man, hoping he can make a difference.

He’s going to try to make a difference again on Saturday, in a vacant lot at Gay and Pontiac streets, just down the street from his shop.

On that day, he plans to take 773 small paper outlines of people and mount them on sticks and place them in the ground on that empty lot. Maybe the visual effect of the toll of crime and drugs and hotheadedness and anger and gangs and guns will have an impact.

Foundation hopes to have a preacher who will read the names of the hundreds of homicide victims since 1980, one for each little paper cutout.

A problem arises there, though. Foundation doesn’t have a list of all the homicide victims. He has some names he has gleaned from newspaper articles and other sources. But the truth is, the names of many, if not most of the homicide victims have been forgotten, at least by the general public.

That in itself is a good illustration of the senselessness of the crime that has ravaged parts of the city for a generation now. Once you’re dead, you’re quickly forgotten.

If you’re arrested and sentenced to 60 years in prison for killing someone, you’re quickly forgotten by the outside world, sometimes even your family.

Foundation’s project will be a picture of the ultimate waste.

The paper cutouts, hundreds of them, have been prepared by students in various community centers, and he hopes to have plenty of students on hand for a ceremony at 1 p.m. Saturday.

Perhaps he can make an impression on young people about how to deal with anger. It’s a better option than having their lives summed up as a nameless paper cutout sometime in the future.