For three days in February, community violence intervention practitioners, leaders at the highest levels of the Department of Justice, funders, researchers and intermediaries like LISC met in St. Louis to celebrate and advance community-based safety work. LISC’s vice president for Safety & Justice, Mona Mangat, describes how revelatory it felt to be there and see this historic perspective shift in action.
Recently, my team and I attended a gathering that revealed, in a way I’ve never seen in my 20 years in this field, that community-led safety work is finally being recognized as the indispensable approach it is. That community safety belongs in the hands of the community itself.
The event, organized by the Department of Justice, was an information-sharing session and celebration of nearly 50 community-based groups that received grants from the $100 million the Biden Administration has dedicated to supporting community violence intervention or CVI. The grants are part of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act passed last summer, and represent the historic federal commitment to building an infrastructure for CVI and legitimizing it as a critical part of public safety efforts.
LISC, too, received $3.75 million from this pool, to provide training and technical assistance and capacity-building grants to new grantees, to help them build the long-term organizational strength they need to make the work sustainable and as effective as possible. The grant money is also supporting us to build an online center for CVI resources—video-taped trainings, webinars, articles and other materials that will be available to grantees and anyone else working in the CVI world. (The hub will build on what we have already begun offering.)
But back to the conference: The funding for CVI in and of itself is unprecedented—the DOJ’s Amy Solomon described it as “the largest targeted federal investment in these strategies in history.” But it was the spirit of the gathering itself, and the highlighting of CVI’s history and value, that made it so exceptional. The powers-that-be now acknowledge that “law enforcement as a single ubiquitous strategy of public safety is not tenable,” Aqeela Sherrills, a violence interruption expert who runs the Community Based Public Safety Collective, told Washington Post. “You need to have an ecosystem; you can’t have public safety without the public.”
Eddie Bocanegra, a longtime violence prevention leader from Chicago and one of our partners who is now working as a senior advisor at the Office of Justice Programs, organized and presided over the conference and, in many ways, set its tone. Eddie spent 14 years in prison for his role in a gang-related homicide when he was a young teen, and he knows intimately the trauma that both leads to and results from being ensnared in a culture of violence.
“What we are seeing is a movement at a time when our country is finally acknowledging that your work matters, you matter, what you do matters,” Eddie told the 400-plus people gathered. I’m sure it was the first time that most of the attendees, especially those coming from the trenches of CVI work, had heard words like that from a government official who was formerly incarcerated himself.
Even the run-of-show marked a sea change: Pacia Anderson, a local spoken word artist and activist, inaugurated the meeting with a powerful poem about violence, racism and reckoning—a performance celebrating the culture of the communities the grantees represent.
Top leadership from the Department of Justice showed up in force, including Attorney General Merrick Garland and Assistant Attorney General Vanita Gupta, who both addressed the group. So did the leaders of various OJP departments. And each spoke the “language” of CVI. They articulated, for example, how violence in Black and brown communities is a public health pandemic—the result of negative social determinants stemming from structural racism. As Gupta put it, “The problem of violence, including gun violence, is not a series of isolated events but so often the culmination of longstanding unmet needs in our communities.”
And then there was the fact of having so many dedicated CVI practitioners under one roof together, including from rural and tribal communities. They networked with DOJ staff, funders and researchers and most importantly, each other, trading best practices and sharing story after story.
Being in this mix was a proud moment for all of us on the LISC Safety + Justice team. In addition to presenting on the training and technical assistance available to grantees, we offered several panels during the conference. One, on recognizing and responding to the needs of the CVI workforce, stressed the importance of training, mental health support, community building and good salaries for the people who do the often dangerous job of reaching out to residents at the highest risk of being involved in violence.
Another LISC panel addressed strategies for “safe passages” programs, an approach to violence prevention in and around schools. Participants described the many touch points where young people, during school hours, can be ensnared in group violence and how safe passages outreach workers sometimes have to create truce zones so kids can get to school and actually learn there.
Our final presentation unpacked the Bureau of Justice Assistance CVI Implementation Checklist, a series of steps to building and carrying out successful violence intervention and prevention programs that LISC helped produce with the DOJ.
Speakers including Dr. Chico Tillmon, executive director of Chicago’s Heartland Alliance and a veteran CVI worker, fielded questions for two hours from the packed room. It was another indication of the hunger of CVI practitioners for an exchange of ideas and guidance. Inspite of increasing support, most still have to rely on their wits and creativity to stretch resources and navigate rigid civic systems.
A recurring topic throughout the conference was the importance of evaluating the impact of CVI programs and building a bank of data, to inform the work going forward and to help raise money. For years, not only has there been little funding for academic studies of CVI outcomes, but CVI groups themselves rarely have the kind of structure (never mind the bandwidth) to make randomized control trials possible.
Now, the injection of federal funding, together with technical support from intermediaries like LISC, can help change the assessment landscape and add to the existing data on CVI’s effectiveness.
Maybe the most gratifying aspect of the event, to those of us in community development, was hearing over and over again that violence intervention can only be successful when communities have what they need to flourish. This is how CVI and LISC’s mission dovetail. Reuben Miller, the criminologist and author of Halfway Home: Race, Punishment and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration put it beautifully when he declared that housing is a violence reduction strategy. Education is a violence reduction strategy. Jobs, green space, arts and culture are all violence reduction strategies.
We don’t know what will happen with government support after this grant money runs out in three years, and with a divided Congress fighting over funding and the shape that law enforcement should take. But for three February days in St. Louis, it was abundantly clear that CVI is a powerful movement that is only gaining momentum and recognition, and that where there is violence in communities, there are extraordinary people fiercely committed to stopping it at the grass roots.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mona Mangat, Vice President, Safety & Justice Initiatives
Mona directs national safety and justice initiatives at LISC, including overseeing efforts in dozens of cities funded through private and government investments. Her experience includes providing technical assistance to community-law enforcement alliances seeking to reduce crime while building the trust and infrastructure that make communities resilient and safe.