In an opinion piece for Philanthropy News Digest, Mona Mangat, LISC’s vice president for Safety and Justice, and Dr. Shani Buggs, a an assistant professor with the Violence Prevention Research Program at UC Davis, a national expert on gun violence and a LISC partner, describe the efficacy of community violence intervention strategies and the acute need for more support for these proven solutions. “When we put our trust in community members, when we choose to listen rather than dictate and when we have people in power who understand and fund community-based work, we will begin to see progress,” they write.
The opinion piece below was originally published on Philanthropy News Digest:
Gun violence is decimating the country. Why aren’t we funding solutions?
More than 33,000 people have died in mass shootings since January 1, 2023. Not only are guns the leading cause of death for children ages 1 to 19 and young adults age 25 and under, but young Black Americans are 14 times more likely than white youth to die of gun homicide. If ever there was a loud and clear wake-up call to our country, this is it.
To make any kind of headway against this horrific public health epidemic, policy makers and the public alike need to understand that it hasn’t ravaged all Americans equally; the statistics above should make that obvious. It’s an epidemic that disproportionately affects young people in the communities that have endured high rates of violence for years—the same communities of racialized poverty that were bearing the greatest strain from the COVID-19 pandemic, in terms of illness and death, unemployment, food insecurity, and more.
Now more than ever, it’s imperative to recognize gun violence as a fundamental problem of inequality, fueled by trauma and deprivation, and to demand broad public support for a problem-solving approach to violent crime known as community violence intervention (CVI).
CVI programs take many forms but share basic features. They employ neighborhood outreach workers with the local credibility and communication skills necessary to connect with those at highest risk for becoming involved in violent activity. The workers identify and intensively engage these vulnerable individuals to help keep them safe and their lives on track, offering mentorship, mediation in brewing conflicts, and services from cognitive behavioral therapy to job training to housing assistance. And most importantly, these programs are run by individuals working within their own communities.
For decades, dozens of local CVI programs have done meaningful work while subsisting on sporadic municipal and philanthropic grant funding. Program leaders have had to repeatedly lay off workers when money ran dry, which is hardly a recipe for relationship building. But last year the Biden administration dedicated a historic $100 million[1] to CVI initiatives. This federal funding promises to stand up the field in a whole new way, providing support for adequate staffing, organizational capacity building, and research to understand what works and what doesn’t. But federal funding alone isn’t enough. Unrestricted private funding is another necessary tool to support the kinds of violence interventions that quite literally save the lives of many young people.
We come at this issue with different forms of experience—as a community development professional and a public health researcher. What our combined experience tells us is this: Violence isn’t natural or inherent to certain groups of people. It takes hold and spreads like an infectious disease in the presence of chronic social and economic stressors.
Gun violence is highly concentrated in certain census tracts in American cities. Within these structurally disadvantaged neighborhoods, only a tiny percentage of individuals are directly involved, as shooting victims often become perpetrators and vice versa. Yet each violent incident sends out wide ripples of grief, fear, rage, and trauma affecting witnesses, family members, vulnerable children, entire communities. Coupled with a lack of opportunity in the form of quality education, sustainable employment, and substantive improvements in the safety of nearby friends and family, that untreated trauma feeds the never ending cycle of violence.
CVI operates alongside policing but in a strictly separate sphere—and for good reason. In the communities of color most impacted by gun violence, the evidence for benefits from sending in more police officers is equivocal at best. According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, stepped-up police presence may appear to save lives overall. However, in cities with large Black populations, the reduction in homicides “is modest and might even be zero,” even as Black civilians “experience especially large increases in low-level or ‘quality of life’ arrests.”
Unlike policing, in CVI trust is the coin of the realm. CVI outreach workers, many of whom have themselves survived violence and incarceration, lead with love for the communities they serve. And with new federal resources, more of these workers will get the training, compensation, and organizational support required and deserved for performing an arduous, and oftentimes dangerous, job.
CVI, including the programs we have collaborated to design, support, and evaluate, seeks to address both the trauma and the dearth of opportunity, and some programs have been able to demonstrate significant impacts. In a preliminary analysis, for example, with the help of intensive mentorship, transitional paid jobs, and cognitive behavioral therapy, READI Chicago participants reduced their involvement in shootings and homicides by a third. That’s saying a lot when the average participant had been arrested 17 times, and more than a third had been shot at least once. However, few rigorous evaluations of CVI have been completed. Few programs have been funded and carried out consistently enough to properly assess outcomes, and research dollars have not been sufficiently allocated to develop thoughtful evaluation with program leaders. But with new resources flowing, that work will finally see progress.
No one knows what a community is going through better than the people who live within it. Like their neighbors, they, too, hear the gunshots one block over. They, too, grieve over the family members and friends that have been lost to senseless violence. They know what has and hasn’t worked to mitigate this violence, and they will be the ones to help come up with a solution for the future. But tangible support from our leaders is critical for these communities to thrive.
In order to end the gun violence epidemic once and for all, we must act boldly and invest in the solutions that work. We know that when we put our trust in the community members, when we choose to listen rather than dictate and when we have people in power who understand and fund community-based work, we will begin to see progress. It is only then that we can start creating a more humane, safe world for our children to live in. It is only then that we can move forward.
Dr. Shani Buggs is an assistant professor with the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis. Mona Mangat is vice president for safety and justice at the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, a national community development nonprofit.