Ballmer Group has awarded $18 million to the Health Alliance for Violence Intervention, the Community Based Public Safety Collective, Cities United, and the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform to jointly establish community-based solutions to gun violence, the Associated Press reports. 

The funding will support a collaborative effort to bolster community violence interventions in a dozen cities over the next five years. “This is a first-of-its-kind commitment at this level, addressing the problem of community violence in cities through a collective national technical assistance effort,” said Fatimah Loren Dreier, executive director of the Health Alliance for Violence Intervention. “With this significant donation, we are able to scale our collective work supporting cities and enact a strategy that involves significant infrastructure.” 

Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told the AP that he became interested in a community-wide approach to preventing gun violence after taking a closer look at gun violence data. According to the independent research group Gun Violence Archive, deaths caused by gun violence in America jumped 30 percent from 2019 to 2020, the year the pandemic struck. In 2021, the number of such deaths rose an additional 7 percent over the record-breaking totals, reaching nearly 21,000 deaths. 

“Those are just huge numbers, and 42 percent of the total are young Black men under the age of 35,” Ballmer said. “It’s just not about the people who are shot—either murdered or just shot. It’s about what that does to entire communities, the entire neighborhoods in which the shootings occur.” 

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