Within Reach: Increasing Safety Through an Ecosystem of Community Violence Interventions
Never before have the four organizations been funded to work together to bring their respective violence reduction strategy together in a particular city to create a CVI Ecosystem for public safety.
Nina Revoyr, Executive Director of Ballmer Group – Los Angeles, knows that for those who haven’t been exposed to gun violence, “it’s hard to fathom how ever-present it can be. In some neighborhoods, violence is pervasive. And its impact reverberates far beyond the person who’s been shot. The individual and community trauma is immeasurable.” While only a small group of individuals within communities is responsible for gun violence, it scars entire neighborhoods, interrupting and limiting the opportunities that drive economic mobility.
However, there are solutions. While many places across the country are seeing a deadly rise in gun violence, some cities, including Newark and Oakland, are reversing the trend. David Muhammed, CEO of the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform (NICJR) can point to why: “Violence intervention efforts that are intensive, structured, and intentionally focused on those at highest risk of gun violence can result in significant reductions in shootings and homicides.”
Ballmer Group is proud to support an emerging, coordinated approach crafted by four leading Community Violence Intervention (CVI) Technical Assistance Organizations charged with reducing community gun violence through a pilot in 12 U.S. cities. The groups are the Health Alliance for Violence Intervention (HAVI), NICJR, the Community Based Public Safety Collective (CBPSC), and Cities United. This national CVI approach grew out of work Ballmer Group first supported in Los Angeles County.
In a recent AP article announcing the newly formed initiative, Fatimah Dreier, executive director of the HAVI, put the strategy into words: “In most neighborhoods that are economically disadvantaged, most of the people are peaceful and support one another. We are able to identify those who are at very high risk for being caught in the cycle of violence. We’re able to support them with intense case management, help them meet their core needs, and we are able to take them out of that cycle and help drive down violence.”
Vital to the success of these models is the use of credible messengers, violence intervention specialists whose lived experiences with violence and/or incarceration make them especially effective at transforming the lives of those caught in cycles of violence. This is an emerging workforce that is essential for public safety. “Investing in community-based solutions and providing comprehensive training and healing services to frontline community-based public safety practitioners is central to our strategy to reduce violence in the cities hardest hit by violence,” said Aqeela Sherrills, executive director of the CBPSC.
The approach creates an ecosystem of proven reduction strategies – and it couldn’t come a moment too soon. For decades, gun violence has been the leading cause of death for African Americans and Latinos, ages 15 to 34. Deaths caused by gun violence in America jumped 25% from 2019 to 2020, when the pandemic struck. In 2021, the number of deaths rose an additional 7% over the record-breaking totals, reaching nearly 21,000 deaths. 42% of these are young Black men under the age of 35.
Dreier continues: “Not only do these evidence-based, data-driven solutions work, but they are within reach for all cities. It is our obligation as a society to provide the necessary resources to bring these solutions to scale.” And bringing them to scale is core to the grants Ballmer Group has recently made to this effort.
“We focus on the concept that everybody should have an opportunity to achieve what they want to achieve economically. That is certainly not the case today,” Ballmer Group Co-Founder Steve Ballmer noted to the Associated Press, announcing Ballmer Group’s $18 million commitment to the approach crafted by the HAVI, Cities, United, CBPSC and NICJR. “If you look at that data, it is particularly stark for African American males. It’s just not right. It’s not fair.”
Never before have the four organizations been funded to work together to bring their respective violence reduction strategy together in a particular city to create a CVI Ecosystem for public safety. They believe that this approach can result in significant reductions in shootings and homicides. The vision is clear, stated here by Anthony Smith of Cities United: “To dream of a world where young Black men and boys, and their families are safe, healthy, and hopeful. To do this, we must be willing to move away from systems that punish and control, to ones that are grounded in justice, restoration, and healing - our new models must center those most negatively impacted.”
