Amid a surge in gun violence across the United States, funders increasingly are supporting collaborative community violence intervention (CVI) efforts, which can include hospital-based intervention, street outreach, and intense mentorship models. Such a holistic, public health-focused approach requires long-term public funding, however, so foundations are strategically supporting research and data collection, coordination, and technical assistance.

The nation has seen an increase in gun violence since 2020, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reporting a record 45,222 total gun deaths that year, up 14 percent from 2019 and 43 percent from a decade before. Preliminary data project a further 8 percent increase in 2021, and this year, as of October 31, the Gun Violence Archive has documented more than 37,000 deaths and nearly 33,000 injuries in gun violence incidents.

In 2021, the Biden administration convened the White House Community Violence Intervention (CVI) Collaborative of mayors, law enforcement, community violence intervention experts, and philanthropic leaders to advance community-level solutions. In the wake of the shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas, in June Congress passed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (BSCA), which, among other things, will support “extreme risk protection order laws,” invest in mental health services, and support CVI efforts. In September, the U.S. Department of Justice awarded $100 million in support of CVI field building. After decades of inaction and suppression of funding for gun violence research, it appears that public support for gun violence prevention is gaining momentum. According to Everytown for Gun Safety, a research and advocacy organization launched in 2014 by Michael R. Bloomberg, state legislatures have passed at least 45 gun safety laws this year as of September 1.

Five state legislatures have passed—with support from a number of Republicans—bills allowing Medicaid reimbursement for CVI programs, notes Fatimah Loren Dreier, director of the Health Alliance for Violence Intervention (HAVI). “That’s a real shift,” she said. “Because gun violence has been politicized, people have generally said, ‘I’m going to stay on the sidelines.’ Certainly, philanthropy has been there, but generally we find that Republicans aren’t interested…so the idea that there are things that bipartisan support can achieve on addressing violence is very exciting.”

The intersectionality of the impact of gun violence

The context for that shift is that gun violence increasingly is recognized as a public health threat, as well as a racial justice issue since the racial “reckoning” of 2020. While mass shootings often lead to calls for stricter gun control measures and lawsuits against manufacturers—such as those advanced by Brady—community violence intervention (CVI) has been slowly gaining ground over the last 20 years.

In June, the American Academy of Pediatrics announced that firearm deaths jumped 28 percent in 2020 to become the leading cause of death for children and youth under the age of 24. CDC data also showed that, in 2020, Black Americans were at least four times more likely to be killed by a gun than the overall population and 12 times more likely than a white American. Moreover, they saw the largest increase in rates of firearm homicides. Counties with the highest poverty level had firearm homicide rates 4.5 times as high and firearm suicide rates 1.3 times as high as those with the lowest poverty level. In addition, disparities in rates of exposure to firearm fatalities among Black and Latinx children widened in 2020.

Against this background, grantmaking for gun violence-related programs has grown over the last decade. While data are still being collected for 2020 and later, according to Candid, about $18.9 million of institutional grantmaking went to gun violence-related issues in 2013; by 2019, that number had grown to $83 million. The top recipients of gun violence-related funding both in terms of total grant dollars and the number of grants over the past decade include Brady and the Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund. Chicago CRED and the Heartland Alliance also were among the top recipients in terms of grant dollars, while Sandy Hook Promise and Everytown for Gun Safety were among those that received the largest number of grants.

Among the top funders of gun violence prevention (in terms of total grant dollars since 2012) are the Chicago Community Trust, the Joyce Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, the California Wellness Foundation (Cal Wellness), and the Kendeda Fund.

Cal Wellness has awarded about $20 million in support of gun violence prevention efforts just since 2015. Interim program director Jamie N. Schenker has written that, to reduce gun violence, Americans must continue to make policy changes that end easy access to guns, support violence reduction programs informed by community, and address the trauma experienced by people exposed to gun violence.

“Data shows that communities of color, mostly Black and Latino, are more likely to be victims of gun violence [in their communities]. Cal Wellness approaches gun violence as a public health epidemic and believes we must partner with communities most affected by gun violence to research, identify, and invest in solutions that work,” Schenker told Philanthropy News Digest. “Community-driven prevention strategies have successfully reduced gun violence in cities across the state and nation. We need to collaborate on solutions that focus on prevention as well as the after-effects of violence. We also recognize that gun violence is intimately connected to other realities facing the communities most affected—poverty, limited opportunity, social or economic disinvestment, and lack of access to mental health care and other social supports.”

In 2020, the Chicago-based Joyce Foundation announced a five-year, $250 million commitment in support of a new grantmaking strategy focused on racial equity and economic mobility. Gun Violence Prevention & Justice Reform program director Tim Daly estimates that the program will invest between $40 million and $50 million across three focus areas: gun violence prevention through education and evidence-based policies that reduce easy access to guns for those at risk of violence; criminal justice system reform to reduce the harms and racial disparities in aggressive policing, arrests, and incarceration of young adults who commit non-violent gun offenses; and community initiatives in violence intervention—building the research base, identifying best practices, and providing technical assistance. The foundation was one of just a few that funded such research while the 1996 Dickey Amendment—which prohibited federal funding “to advocate or promote gun control” after the National Rifle Association (NRA) lobbied for the elimination of the CDC’s Injury Prevention & Control Center—was in effect.

Concerns about the politics of the issue—the potential reputational risk—prevented many funders from investing in gun violence prevention, said Daly, and historically, it simply has not been a focus for many. But “for us at Joyce, when we look around our community, we see the scourge of gun violence every day, we see the impacts of it, and we’ve experienced it,” he said. “[We] see the intersectionality of the issue, how it intersects with criminal justice issues or education issues or the environment or democracy. These [intersectionalities] are now very plain to us.”

“It seems like we have a growth in philanthropic interest because the research and data and the awareness of it is allowing people to better understand the intersectionality of the gun violence issue: that kids are not able to learn in their schools and in their communities if they are constantly concerned about gun violence in their communities,” he continued. “Perhaps they can’t even get from their home to their school, [or] when a loved one, a family member, someone that they see on the street, gets killed, the impacts it has on that student. How are we then going to prepare that young person to sit in the classroom?...I think that's just one example of where the intersection is becoming much [clearer] to institutional funders and organizations.”

The role of philanthropic funding in gun violence research

Daly explained that what kept the broader public and philanthropic sectors from seeing those intersectionalities sooner were, in part, the lobbying efforts by the NRA, the National Shooting Sports Foundation (the gun industry’s trade association), and similar groups to prevent the restart of investments in public health research. And while in 2020 the federal government began investing $25 million annually in research, a 2021 report commissioned by the Joyce Foundation and Arnold Ventures found that $600 million over five years was needed to achieve the research agenda and development of the data infrastructure necessary. According to Giffords and the Center for American Progress, the federal government spends only $57 in research monies per gun death, compared with $6,556 for lung disease, $2,996 for cancer, and $1,740 for heart disease.

Still, Daly and others see the evidence base built over the past decade as a key factor driving the current surge in support for addressing gun violence as a public health and racial justice issue. One reason the BSCA passed this year, after years of inaction despite multiple tragedies, is that “we know a lot more now than we did 10 years ago,” said Daly. “We've been able to evaluate different policies. We’ve been able to understand the public health impacts of different programs…like CVI. There are new policy and innovations like extreme protection orders.”

In June, Arnold Ventures launched a research agenda to reduce violence by “addressing immediate crises of violence, identifying and addressing the underlying causes of violence, and promoting effective police investigations to solve violent crime.” In a Q&A with PND, vice president of criminal justice research Jocelyn Fontaine said, “[W]e are deeply interested in building the evidence base, not only on the core question of whether an intervention ‘worked’: chiefly, did it produce measurable reductions in violence and advance community safety–but also understand the ‘how’: How was that intervention designed, implemented, staffed, and resourced, and what types of intervention components are related to positive outcomes and measurable impact?”

And philanthropy can support the development of “exemplars,” said the Health Alliance for Violence Intervention’s (HAVI) Dreier, that demonstrate to elected officials at local, state, and national levels that CVI programs work and can create systems change and help secure long-term funding. Philanthropy can make long-term investments to scale that work, she suggested, either as part of place-based work or in funding a multi-state infrastructure-building effort.

Building a community violence intervention (CVI) ecosystem

Thus, the combination of research-based evidence and awareness of the intersectionality of gun violence, public health, and other social justice issues has boosted support for CVI. For example, Ballmer Group, which focuses primarily on economic mobility, began investing in gun violence prevention because “public safety is essential” to improving components of economic mobility such as education, housing, and workforce development, according to Nina Revoyr, the philanthropy’s Los Angeles executive director. “The data clearly show that young Black men are disproportionately impacted by gun violence—everyday, under-the-radar violence,” she said. “Given that Ballmer Group recognizes that Black families face the most persistent barriers to economic mobility, public safety and gun violence prevention and intervention are important places to lean in.”

In March 2022, Ballmer Group awarded grants totaling $18 million to the Health Alliance for Violence Intervention (HAVI), the Community Based Public Safety Collective, Cities United, and the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform (NICJR) to build a community violence intervention ecosystem. With the goal of reducing gun violence by 20 percent over three years in 12 cities, the grantees will collaborate to conduct cost assessments and deep-dive analyses in each city, starting with Indianapolis, Newark, Baton Rouge, and Baltimore; develop tailored strategies for reducing gun violence; and support their implementation.

One impetus for public officials to support CVI programs is that, while gun violence is highly concentrated (in 2015, half of all U.S. gun homicides occurred in 127 cities), it is costly not only for the immediate community but also for the city, county, and state, said NICJR executive director David Muhammad. NICJR’s Cost of Gun Violence report details government expenses associated with each shooting—including crime scene response, hospital and rehabilitation, criminal justice, incarceration, victim support, and lost tax revenue—which average at least $1 million per death and $750,000 per injury.

“And then when you take into account other indirect costs which are real—the loss in property value…the lost productivity of the economy when victim and or perpetrator were working or their future work—some of the highest estimates talk about $10 million per shooting over the lifetime of the two individuals involved,” said Muhammad. “And the toll on families. The real cost here is the human toll, right?”

While CVI programs are not new, “what is new is a broader recognition of the need for and effectiveness of approaches that work together as an ecosystem and build on strengths and resources that communities already have,” said Revoyr. The Health Alliance for Violence Intervention’s (HAVI) Dreier explained that a community violence intervention ecosystem would identify the people at the highest risk, provide interventions, and monitor the situation, as with any public health threat. One major component of that ecosystem is hospital-based violence intervention programs (HVIPs), which support victims with wraparound care at bedside.

“[P]eople view violence as exclusively as a criminal justice issue, and what that means is…arrest and incarceration….What we're saying is: You can take a health approach,” said Dreier. “You can reach that high-need, high-risk population, [including at] the hospital, because people who are shot—their likelihood of being harmed again increases.”

HVIPs would be one of many interventions within the ecosystem; and in a system dynamics model, a city could adjust different components to maximize impact. “[I]f we take an intervention away or increase an intervention, does it or at what rate does it help decrease violence? If you build out a systems dynamic model, you’re able to get a fuller picture of what impact you’re having,” explained Dreier. “What are the factors that really matter?...But the idea is that it’s not one thing; it's several things all complementing one another that really make a difference.”

A 2020 report from Arnold Ventures and John Jay College outlined seven strategies and 17 recommendations for reducing violence, including improving the physical environment, strengthening anti-violence social norms and peer relationships, mitigating financial distress, and reducing the harmful effects of the justice process. Alongside those longer-term strategies, Dreier said, targeted programs for those at greatest risk such as crisis management, street intervention, and targeted trauma-informed care will be critical to addressing the near-term problem.

Under the Ballmer Group initiative, law enforcement will work to focus more on preventing serious crime and violence as a way to address issues of racial injustice in policing, said Muhammad of the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform (NICJR). “If law enforcement focused more of their resources on [gun violence], then [it] would have…a reduced footprint on the overall community. It really can become a win-win.”

And cities that have adopted holistic strategies have seen promising results. For example, the City of Indianapolis, which implemented NICJR’s gun violence reduction strategy last year, has already seen a 17 percent year-over-year drop in homicides and an 11 percent drop in non-fatal shootings in 2022.

Funder collaboratives supporting coordination among service providers

Another trend in grantmaking for gun violence prevention is the growth of funder collaboratives. In the aftermath of the 2011 shooting of then-Congresswoman Gabby Giffords in Tucson, the Joyce Foundation and others launched the Fund for a Safer Future (FSF), which Daly chairs. FSF, which began 2022 with nearly 30 foundations, expects to have as many as 40 members by year-end. And while there’s no question that mass shootings lead to increases in funding—even funders that won’t join have reached out for guidance on how they could support aligned projects, said Daly. And one of FSF’s goals is to help eliminate peaks and valleys in funding and ensure continued growth.

“Gun violence is a unique, complicated challenge, and often organizations don’t know where to even start,” said FSF vice chair David Brotherton, who serves as fund advisor for gun violence prevention and communications at Kendeda Fund, which has invested more than $18 million since 2014 in gun violence prevention. “The Fund for a Safer Future offers those donors a remarkable community or network where they find their footing, learn from others who’ve been at it for a while, [and] build a strategy that works for their own priorities or goals….The key to our success is how our…member organizations can take ideas from the collective FSF table back to their individual organizations and build a strategy and portfolio based on those approaches….The dollars reflect this: We have made roughly $20 million in grants as a group, but more than $135 million in aligned grantmaking.”

With more than 50 members, the Chicago-based Partnership for Safe and Peaceful Communities (PSPC) has awarded more than $115 million since it was created in 2016 “in response to the dual, mutually reinforcing crises of debilitating gun violence and eroding police legitimacy, and in reaction to the sharp spike in shootings,” said co-chair Tawa Mitchell, senior program officer at the MacArthur Foundation. The foundation has provided $23.2 million for gun violence prevention since 2012—and nearly $22.4 million in support of PSPC-related efforts. PSPC is co-chaired by Jennifer Keeling, director of strategic partnerships at Chicago CRED, which works with high-risk individuals, providing street outreach, case management, mental health services, education, and employment and training (and received a $10 million general operating support grant from Ballmer Group in 2020).

Funder collaboratives can build on collective assets because philanthropies are able to use their voice “to call attention to issues, put pressure where we see it needed, and convene people and bring them together, even on difficult topics,” Mitchell and Keeling told PND. PSPC has enabled foundations to support the most promising approaches “as well as focus on learning…about what’s happening and what works from experts and community leaders most affected by gun violence.” Taking a “whole person, whole community” approach, PSPC helps community organizations share best practices, data, resources, and training. In North Lawndale, five partners began collaborating in 2021 to serve at least 50 percent of the young people at risk—the critical mass needed to break the cycle of retaliatory shootings. Partners include the Heartland Alliance’s READI Chicago (Rapid Employment and Development Initiative), which leverages relationships with law enforcement and outreach organizations and University of Chicago Crime Lab data to identify young men at risk of committing violence.

While many CVI efforts are aimed at youth under age 18, 90 percent of shooting victims are 18 or older, said READI Chicago senior director Jorge Matos. “There were few services and supports that existed for men who were high risk facing barriers like housing, substance abuse, trauma, and loss—all results of decades of disinvestment and systemic racism.” A study of 2,500 men at highest risk of gun violence involvement—referred through community partners, correctional institutions, and data-driven algorithms—found 63 percent fewer arrests and 19 percent fewer victimizations among READI Chicago participants. Another partner in the Lawndale initiative is CP4P (Communities Partnering 4 Peace), which works to professionalize the field of street outreach through practitioner training in violence reduction, standardization of curriculum, and certification.

Need for technical assistance

Implementing effective CVI programs, the National Institute of Criminal Justice Reform’s (NICJR) Muhammad points out, requires “strict and tight management” to ensure that the highest-risk individuals are being engaged with the necessary level of intensity. “It's easier for a service provider to say, ‘I'm going to work with this 15-year-old who might be difficult to serve but is interested in services and I have a relationship with him,’ and we’re saying, ‘No, we need to work with this 24-year-old who has seven previous arrests, is not interested in services, and is driving around looking to shoot his rifle. That's who you have to serve.”

Funders like Cal Wellness and the Joyce Foundation are well aware of the need for technical assistance to access public funding and develop best practices. “We do have a fear that [the] immediate surge of funding is, in some respects, perhaps, overwhelming the capacity of the field at the moment, because it's a fairly new field,” said Daly. “We feel that yet another place that we could support efforts in the short- to medium-term is trying to build out the workforce as necessary to scale these programs, especially as public investment increases.”

“Given the scope of the issue, we thought funding [technical assistance] providers would be the most leveraged approach,” said Ballmer Group’s Revoyr. “[The grantees] are collectively helping to ‘ready the field’ for greater public and private investment; helping to standardize how work is approached and discussed; and working to increase training, effectiveness, and capacity of work on the ground—as well as the knowledge of city, county, and state leaders.”

For example, the Health Alliance for Violence Intervention (HAVI) is developing 43 standards across eight domains for hospital-based violence intervention programs: planning and design; community partnerships; staff development; participant engagement; service delivery; data collection, evaluation, and research; hospital systems transformation; and sustainability and funding.

The CVI field is “experiencing a paradigm shift toward being recognized as integral to the public safety ecosystem,” said Chico Tillmon, executive director of the READI National Center. With federal funding from the American Rescue Plan expected to continue for the next several years at local and state levels and the Justice Department’s recent grants, he said, “[i]t is vital that CVI organizations and professionals are equipped to design interventions based on evidence and analysis, innovate systematically and creatively, effectively manage implementation and program monitoring, and use research consistently to enhance and communicate impact.”

Equally important is the need to support Black-led organizations in the field. In 2021, the San Francisco Foundation (SFF) partnered with the Brotherhood of Elders Network to develop the Bese Saka Initiative to strengthen the ecosystem of Black community organizations by awarding capacity-building grants. “[T]here are groups anchored in their local communities already coming together to heal and build connections,” said SFF CEO Fred Blackwell. “They are engaging those who our government and systems have failed and increasing feelings of agency and belonging in their schools, neighborhoods, and regions.”

A ‘key moment’ for CVI funding…and ongoing challenges

The work of CVI programs and funders is necessarily multifaceted. As Chicago CRED’s Keeling put it, “This holistic approach is predicated on a simple recognition: The causes of gun violence are complex, so the solution needs to be comprehensive.”

“With gun violence—as with so many other issues—our systems and laws place the highest burden on Black, Indigenous, and people of color through housing segregation and disinvestment,” said Blackwell. “Many community organizations that do work directly on gun violence prevention are also working on improving people’s lives through a variety of programs. In light of recent trends, it might have to be a ‘both and’ approach, where we need to provide more support for those approaches targeted directly at preventing gun violence. I don’t know if we have the time or the leeway to work on issues around gun violence without also addressing it head on as something that must be contained before it can be cured.”

The effectiveness of CVI is clearly seen in the increase in violence during the COVID-19 pandemic when intensive in-person interventions had to be curtailed. According to Muhammad of NICJR, as of 2019, Oakland had seen seven consecutive years of declines in gun violence—culminating in a total of 50 percent reductions in both homicides and non-fatal shootings—and a 38 percent year-to-date reduction in homicides as of March 2020. With CVI efforts suspended, however, the city ended the year with a 20 percent increase in homicides. In the best years before COVID-19, there were fewer than 70 homicides; in 2022 the number had exceeded 100 as of October 4.

Other challenges include “the disconnect between the perceived and actual risk of gun ownership, which [has] an impact on how we can successfully deploy a public health approach to the issue,” said the Joyce Foundation’s Daly. One way the foundation is addressing that gap is Project Unloaded, which helps young people discuss and make reasonable decisions about whether they want to own guns.

And more public investment is needed to develop the field. “I think we have seen a lot of interest from philanthropy…to support the CVI approach, both from an equity point of view, and also because of the emerging evidence that there is some success to be had there,” said Daly. But “the strategies themselves are very costly, and they are not sustainable on private philanthropy alone. It would require significant public investment to scale those strategies to the sufficient number of neighborhoods and cities to truly be effective.”

Support for CVI is at a “key moment,” where more funding for infrastructure and data collection is needed, Ballmer Group’s Revoyr said during a HAVI webinar. “When CVI approaches have been intentional and focused; when there’s been a particular focus on the young men most at risk of engaging in gun violence, results have been very compelling,” she later told PND. “All of this said, more research and evaluation are needed….It’s important that CVI is studied more—and also worth noting that traditional research and evaluation methods are difficult for this type of work, which centers on people…who may not wish to engage with researchers.”

“I am hopeful that the philanthropic field will see just how intertwined gun violence is with their work,” said Blackwell. “The fact is that gun violence transcends the silos in which we live and work. We can no longer hope that somebody else will carry the fight.”

Kyoko Uchida is features editor at Philanthropy News Digest.

(Photo credit: Getty Images/Stock Depot)