“A Blueprint for How to Thrive”: LISC’s Community Justice Accelerator Helps Local Safety Groups Get Stronger
Grassroots groups that address violence in their communities are lean and underfunded and provide crucial services to their neighborhoods. They're also increasingly recognized as indispensable to the safety and wellbeing of the places where they work. A new LISC program, the Community Justice Accelerator, hopes to help those groups become stronger organizations, poised to receive and deploy the funding they need. At a recent LISC gathering, participants in the first Accelerator pilot shared challenges and insights, and their hopes for the future of the work.
Photo at top courtesy of Alliance of Concerned Men.
As just about anyone in the community development world knows, places where residents have abundant opportunities and resources are also the safest—the least likely to be plagued by crime, violence and disorder.
Which is why people working in the trenches of community safety and justice in underinvested places do so much more than intervene in potentially violent situations, as crucial as that work is. The leaders of grassroots community organizations addressing violence know that to stem crime, their neighborhoods need the same positive determinants of safety as wealthier neighborhoods.
To promote safety and wellbeing, then, these groups have to cover many bases and be relentless problem solvers. They help fellow residents connect with job training and housing and health care resources; they organize conflict resolution trainings, sports events, safe passage and after-school programs, food distribution—even trash collection—and so many of the other requisites of quality of life that people in well-off communities take for granted.
But in spite of how critical their work is, these groups usually do their jobs with few employees and extremely limited capital, and have little to no time to devote to organizational growth and capacity building. They are mostly trying to keep up with their communities' needs, which makes it hard to chase after the resources to keep the work going.
That’s exactly why LISC created the Community Justice Accelerator (CJA), an initiative to get funding, technical guidance and networking opportunities to the grassroots organizations that are “the first responders of community challenges,” as LeVar Michael of LISC’s Safety + Justice team describes them. LISC’s first cohort of Accelerator participants, representing six groups from rural and urban communities across the country, just finished six, concentrated months of trainings, mentorship and peer networking that make up part of the program. And they recently gathered in New York City, in person, to share the hurdles they face and the imperative of a support system like what the Community Justice Accelerator aims to help build.
“I think I can speak for every organization that attended [the Accelerator program], that this was well-needed to strengthen our organizations internally,” said Taylor Paul, co-founder of the VA League for Safer Streets, a basketball-plus-education program that serves men in Richmond neighborhoods with high crime rates.
Paul met one of his VA League co-founders, the late Jawad Abul, when the two men were serving multi-decade prison sentences, and teamed up “to find a way to come home and eradicate some of the social ills that we helped create.” Together with Robert Morris, a veteran of Richmond’s 1990s midnight basketball leagues, they saw the game as a carrot that could pull people in off the street for—as their motto puts it—“workshops before jump shots.” In its second year, the program, which requires players to do conflict resolution and other life skills training, was credited with helping lower the city’s crime rate by eight percent. During game nights, gun violence incidents in League neighborhoods plummet.
But despite its successes and accolades, the League is always struggling to find funding and keep up with community demand. The Accelerator, says Paul, “gave us the skillset to pay more attention to the details of running an organization…[a] blueprint for how to thrive. You don’t get this from people.”
When it comes to addressing community demand, Kristina Williams, director of the Charles Village Community Benefits District in Baltimore, is an expert among experts. Created in 1995 and supported by a special tax levy to tackle crime, Charles Village serves a community of extremes, comprising the Johns Hopkins campus and well-to-do, predominantly white neighborhoods as well as several neighborhoods of color, where poverty and disinvestment are chronic. “We serve 800 small businesses and all 11,000 residents of the district,” says Williams. “And we do that with a staff of 15.”
But still, they do it. “We're out on the street seven days a week,” says Williams, including with trash pick-up and anti-graffiti crews that the city doesn’t provide. “Our sanitation crew is out there seven days a week. Our safety patrols are out there seven days a week. Our community outreach coordinator, you can find him everywhere because he lives in the community.” Charles Village also offers mental health first aid and conflict mediation, among many other services. “We always pick up the phone,” Williams adds, even when the City can’t, or doesn’t.
The Alliance of Concerned Men (ACM) in Washington, DC, another CJA participant, is intimately familiar with partnering with city government to take a comprehensive approach to safety, and doing work local government may not be equipped or funded to handle. It was founded by a group of former high school friends in 1991, one of whose son’s had been shot and killed, to take on gun violence. This was at a time when D.C. was known as the murder capital of the nation. Between the year ACM began their programming and 2012, the neighborhoods where they worked—deemed the most violent in the city—experienced almost no homicides, and the city as a whole went from more than 500 murders a year to approximately 80.
Executive director Terrence Staley, like other community safety practitioners, emphasizes that really knowing a neighborhood and being a credible messenger of nonviolence is absolutely key to being effective. “We live in the community, our office in the community,” says Staley. “Ninety percent of my staff is prior incarcerated. We have over 70 staff in the District of Columbia all doing public safety, working in DCPS schools. I have prior incarcerated individuals giving conflict resolution in DCPS schools. That just speaks to some of the work that we're doing.”
There’s no question that “community leaders and locally rooted organizations are the best positioned to understand their communities’ needs,” says Mona Mangat, vice present for LISC’s Safety + Justice work, But these same groups, she adds, often led by people of color and representing communities of color, get less grant money and with more strings attached and cited a recent study by the Chronicle of Philanthropy that backs that up.
While these groups have the trust of their communities, they are often subject to the ‘capacity paradox,’ where organizations with committed leaders and good solutions cannot access flexible philanthropic capital until they build their capacity. At the same time, they can’t build this capacity without much-needed capital. And that’s what the Community Justice Accelerator aims to help remedy.
As of now, LISC plans to support three more cohorts of grassroots groups to receive Accelerator funding, training, technical guidance, and connections. But growing the program will require more funding, funding that would also go toward creating tools to help organizations diagnose their capacity needs and learn how to meet them, and to sponor a gathering of Accelerator participants to work with experts and each other to solve common challenges.
That kind of follow-through and ongoing collaboration is every bit as important as the initial funding a group receives, said Sean Goode, a veteran of safety and justice activism in Seattle who has served as a consultant and guide to the inaugural Community Justice Accelerator group. “This [work] requires relationship [between] those who are resourcing the effort and those who are making the work happen on the ground….We don't need funders to simply drop off the bag and go away. We need [them] to bring it with us and journey together. Because there is no greater power than the collective ‘us.’”
To learn more about LISC’s Community Justice Accelerator and to partner with us, contact Mona Mangat at mmangat@lisc.org.