For years, local gun violence prevention programs have struggled to get long term funding. The people who look out for students on and off US school campus, sit at the bedsides of gunshot wound survivors, and embrace the families of homicide victims, are rarely paid with dedicated public money. Instead many groups survive on unpaid hours, donations and competitive one-off grants. But since 2021 a historic amount of government funding has been made available across the US that can turn the tide.
This money comes as US cities are in dire need of intervention and healing resources after a nearly two-year increase in homicides and shootings. Still, this potential windfall also comes with confusion, especially for smaller programs whose staff don’t have the bandwidth to manage tedious, competitive applications without support.
“It’s been a headache, but we’re learning,” said Dante Gaines, a co-founder of 1 Hundred Years Enterprises in Richmond, California, of the grant writing and application processes. “It’s all very tedious, especially when you’ve got three brothers who don’t really know what we are doing.” Gaines and his partners, Lejon Reese and Patrick Scott, met while they were serving decades-long sentences in Folsom State Prison and founded the organization in 2018. Since then they’ve started speaking at a local elementary school, helping other formerly incarcerated people find their footing, and building relationships with the young men most at risk of being on either side of a gun. The trio quit their day jobs to throw themselves into their community work and are mainly operating on donations from family and local residents as well as a contract with the county’s Boys and Girls club, a national youth development organization.
They’ve had city and nonprofit grant applications denied in the past but are still applying. Scott says that a consistent injection of funding would give the co-founders more time to innovate and expand their reach. “We’re so worried about how to get funded it takes away from us doing what we’re very good at doing,” he said. “A few years worth of funding gives us enough room to be creative.”
Community organizations like Reese’s, Gaines’ and Scott’s have long called for long-term funding. These groups reach the majority Black and Latino residents who bear the brunt of the burden of gun violence in the US, using art and yoga to help people heal from trauma and taking young people on trips out of state. The work requires money for supplies and staffing, but many groups have for years eked by on grants and contracts, volunteer work and donations.
Yet money has been scarce because of the red tape involved in government grant applications and oversight, organizers said. If someone does get a government contract or other type of public money it is usually allotted only for a few months or a year, which isn’t enough time to develop the relationship necessary to get someone out of the cycle of violence. Donations and philanthropic funds covered gaps but violence prevention advocates say it’s the government’s responsibility to make sure grassroots healing and intervention groups are able to easily access public dollars.
“Philanthropy dollars can fill a gap but those government dollars can sustain the organizations for the long arc. This direct investment is critical,” said Michael-Sean Spence, senior director of community safety initiatives for Everytown for Gun Safety.
The organization’s appeals have found a more receptive audience, however, as homicides began to climb across the US, coinciding with demands for money to be funnelled away from police and toward holistic violence prevention. The money, activists and interventionists hoped, would go to local groups whose staff was entrenched in the streets and had a proven track record of diverting people from violence and helping families and individuals heal.
In 2021, after homicides jumped by 30% over the year before, the Biden administration directed counties to use American Rescue Plan funds for violence prevention work and made millions of dollars available through the health and human services, education and housing departments. In California, the budget for the state’s violence intervention and prevention grant program (CalVIP) has been increased by $200m and is available to more cities and programs than ever before.
“It took the pandemic of Covid-19 to exacerbate the already debilitating, but forgotten, pandemic of gun violence,” said Julius Thibodeaux, the co-director of Movement for Life in Sacramento. The group used to be an affiliate of Advance Peace, an organization that is now a national model for violence prevention. Thibodeaux says he and his staff began to see more young people involved in gunplay and points to the loss of school and extracurriculars that gave them refuge.
“The money is important because we can get them on the right track, but you need the long term support resources to make sure nothing derails them,” he continued.
However, the newly available funds do little good if the barrier to entry is too high for small groups to clear. That’s where national organizations hope they can leave their mark. Spence, of Everytown, said his group is helping local groups take advantage of the historic amount of money available at the local, state and federal levels.
“It takes time for that change to occur and community programs are not waiting for governments to figure this funding out – they’re meeting needs today,” he continued.
“There’s a learning curve on the ground to find the info,” said Greg Jackson, executive Director of Community Justice Action Fund, a national violence prevention group. “Prior to these executive actions we had $5 to $10 million and now we have billions that people can compete for.”
For programs like 1 Hundred Year Enterprises, the support that Jackson and Spence refer to couldn’t come soon enough. The founders plan to start working with youth in juvenile detention, recently partnered with the Richmond officials, to hold a series of meetings between Black men who once contributed to the city’s gun violence. They plan to start taking students on excursions that they hope will open their horizons.
“It takes much determination and resolve to run and fund a program,” said Lejon Reese. “We’ve lost sleep and sacrificed family time but we have to keep boots on the ground because we’re trying to deter youth from a path that leads to death or jail.”
