Community violence intervention or CVI has proven to be a humane, evidence-based alternative to over-policing and mass incarceration, and is finally getting more of the attention it deserves. LISC’s Safety & Justice team, longtime promoters of CVI in the communities where we work, has embarked on a series of webinars for the Department of Justice, offering CVI best practices from the people who know it best. Read on for highlights from the series launch.
From the grassroots to the White House, there’s growing consensus in America that the time has come to invest in community violence intervention (CVI).
CVI is a strategy to reduce the toll of injury, death, and trauma from gun violence. It relies on neighborhood outreach workers and violence interrupters, people with the lived experience and local credibility necessary to build relationships with those most at risk in the cycle of violent harm. Their mentorship and real-time interventions can save lives. Implemented primarily by small nonprofits, CVI has been around for decades. But the strategy has been underappreciated, understudied, and underfunded.
Until now. Recognizing CVI’s promise as a humane, evidence-based alternative to over-policing and mass incarceration in high-poverty communities of color where trauma and deprivation fuel shootings, the Biden administration is giving the field a huge boost by infusing game-changing financial resources—nearly $100 million in 2022 alone—and robust technical assistance. These resources will help build the capacity of CVI organizations, provide training and better pay and benefits to CVI workers, seed new programs and cross-sector coalitions, and evaluate outcomes to define best practices.
As part of this work, on September 14 the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Assistance (DOJ-BJA) kicked off a five-part webinar series on CVI. Developed by LISC’s Safety & Justice team and moderated by LISC senior program officer LeVar Michael, the first webinar opened with remarks by Amy Solomon, principal deputy assistant attorney general of DOJ’s Office of Justice Programs.
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“For too long,” Solomon said, “we have leaned too heavily on policing as the only solution . . . We know there’s a better way, one that builds on what we have learned about violence and its causes.”
To the webinar’s more than 1,200 registrants LISC’s Michael presented statistical maps showing how high rates of violence, high poverty, high unemployment, and high all-cause mortality overlap in disinvested places. These facts “call out to us,” he said, to focus on saving lives through timely CVI interventions, but also on a longer-term project to improve community conditions, tackle entrenched structural and often race-based inequities, and link CVI participants to the opportunities all people need to live healthy, productive lives.
BJA’s first webinar featured two panels that addressed key features of successful CVI: community engagement and organizational partnerships.
Speakers emphasized that to achieve the strategy’s highest goals, community residents and other stakeholders must be actively involved and hold real power in the process, and practitioners need to embed themselves in a network of organizations, including governmental entities, that can reinforce CVI work and provide other services to participants, from affordable housing to job preparation to trauma-informed cognitive behavioral therapy.
Brenda Palms, president and CEO of the North Lawndale Employment Network (NLEN) on Chicago’s West Side, observed that jobs are an important part of CVI in communities like the one she serves, where nearly 60 percent of residents have had involvement in the criminal justice system and unemployment is three or four times the national average. Currently NLEN aims to double the number of local justice-involved folks who get a crack at stable living-wage employment through its 15-year-old Sweet Beginnings program. “Having a quality job helps you feel that you are part of something and that you matter,” said Palms.
Anthony Smith, executive director of Cities United, which partners with municipalities to establish comprehensive community safety programs, spoke about the need for CVI programs to intervene when violent confrontations bubble up, but also to have referral plans in place for people who are ready to move forward in their lives, and to address upstream causes of violence. “What are we doing,” he asked, “so that people who are most at risk are not pushed out of school and have access to employment, to make sure their families are living in safe and affordable housing?”
Rodney Brown is executive director and CEO of North Lawndale’s New Covenant Community Development Corporation. With deep experience in corporate and nonprofit governance, he described how effective cross-sector anti-violence coalitions take the time to identify and understand each organization’s separate goals and competencies as well as their common objective. “There’s a different foundation needed for a ten-story building than for a single-story building,” Brown observed. “Without the proper foundation at the outset, that ten-story building isn’t going to stand.”
In 2015 attorney Ainka Jackson, a former foster-care case manager and public defender, became founding executive director of the Selma Center for Nonviolence, Truth & Reconciliation, based in a cradle of the civil rights movement. In BJA’s webinar Jackson addressed the need for broad capacity building in rural communities like Alabama’s. Facing extremely high rates of poverty and violence, CVI workers in the Selma area work tirelessly to meet needs, often without the ability to connect people to mental health services, addiction treatment, or shelter for the unhoused. “We see urban challenges, with rural resources,” she said.
And James Timpson, director for community partnership and safety at Roca Maryland and the Roca Impact Institute, spoke on the two-way street of accountability. Yes, Timpson said, young people who transgress must be held to account—but “without the first thing being consequences, without the first thing being demonizing, without the first thing being stigmatizing.” Law enforcement also should be held accountable for policing communities without victimizing those who already carry a heavy burden of trauma. Police “definitely have a role to play” in CVI, he said, “but they have to be willing to come to the table without authority, as true partners.”
LISC, for its part, has been supporting CVI practitioners from the field’s early days, and is committed to building CVI program capacity, advancing data collection and evaluation, and sharing best practices.
For more on this topic, see BJA’s CVI implementation checklist (developed with LISC), a step-by-step guide for communities seeking to establish a comprehensive CVI practice. And stay tuned for a forthcoming LISC research paper, Implementing Outreach-Based Community Violence Intervention Programs: Operational Needs and Policy Recommendations, authored by violence-prevention expert Dr. Shani Buggs and colleagues and based on in-depth interviews with experienced on-the-ground CVI practitioners.
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Register below to attend future webinars in this series, which will deliver information on a wide range of issues important to successfully implementing CVI strategies.
Resources for this webinar series were funded in part by
