Andrew Woods has wielded far more passion than money in his decades-long fight against violence in his hometown of Hartford, Conn. Help is on the way, however, for his nonprofit and hundreds more nationwide.

In 2004, Woods, a licensed social worker, began Connecticut’s first hospital-based program to provide mental-health services and support to victims of violence. It is part of Hartford Communities That Care, whose trained caseworkers are dispatched to the organization’s partner hospital when victims of violence arrive, then work with victims after their release and return home. The goal: help heal victims’ trauma and de-escalate the conflicts that led to their injury, which in turn reduces the chance of retaliatory violence.

The nonprofit has helped nearly 1,800 victims of violence despite a shoestring budget. “I’ve only had a staff of two to four people over the last decade or so,” Woods says.

Suddenly, however, funding doors are opening. Thanks to a new federal grant, Woods’s crisis-response team has grown to 12. Also, certified violence-prevention workers at Hartford Communities and similar groups in Connecticut soon will be able to bill the state for their casework with victims of violent crime; Connecticut recently became the first state to dedicate state and federal Medicaid funds to violence prevention. Illinois followed suit days later.

Nationwide, groups like Hartford Communities are getting a big infusion of public money, often for the first time. Traditionally, governments taking on violence spend on police, summer youth and jobs programs, parks and recreation, and repair of blighted property.

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What’s new is significant federal, state, and local dollars earmarked for strategies known as “community violence intervention.” Targeting neighborhoods where violence is concentrated — often high-poverty areas whose residents are chiefly people of color — the programs deploy “credible messengers.” These are typically trusted figures such as faith leaders, coaches, teachers, counselors, former gang members, individuals who have served time in prison, victims of violence, and relatives of those killed. They aim to defuse volatile situations; mentor those most at risk for violence and help them find internships, job training, and support services; and counsel those suffering trauma from violence.

A few of these organizations have ready access to funding. Chicago CRED, co-founded by former U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs of the Emerson Collective, has tens of millions in annual revenue. Many, however, struggle just to keep the lights on or even pay their frontline workers, who often volunteer while working 9-to-5 jobs.

Efforts by those workers in Detroit “are absolutely beautiful, comprehensive, swift, and dramatic,” says Alia Harvey-Quinn, who leads Force Detroit, a nonprofit supporting the city’s community groups. “They just have to choose between their livelihoods and this work, between feeding their families and doing the work that’s of critical importance to them.”

Research on violence intervention is mixed, but officials have been persuaded to try new approaches by promising case studies, a big push from President Joe Biden, and interest in public-safety measures that don’t center on more police — interest that has grown in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd in 2020.

John J. Kim, Chicago Tribune, TNS, Getty Images

With homicide rates breaking records in cities nationwide, at least 15 states have pledged $690 million to community violence-intervention efforts — more than 10 times what five states dedicated in 2017, according to a Giffords Law Institute estimate. Mayors, too, are making funding available. Indianapolis has committed $45 million to community groups, almost a third of the Covid-19 federal relief funds that it’s putting toward public safety.

Chicago is targeting $85 million to violence intervention, part of a $411 million, three-year package of public-safety measures that include more affordable housing and job training. Mayor Lori Lightfoot likened this spending to public-works funding in the 1930s, suggesting that violence today is a crisis on par with the Great Depression.

“This is our WPA moment,” Lightfoot said as the city’s number of homicides approached 797 late last year, the most in a quarter century.

Unprecedented Commitment

Much of the new money for violence intervention is coming from the federal government. Last year, President Biden ordered the redesign of 26 grant programs in five agencies — including the Department of Housing and Urban Development and Department of Education — to prioritize violence prevention or make programs eligible for funding.

The biggest source of new funding is Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, passed by Congress last year as a Covid-19 relief measure. That law directed $350 billion to state and local coffers to be spent over three years, and the White House explicitly designed the legislation to make violence-intervention groups eligible for the funding. (The Biden administration also included $5 billion for violence intervention in its Build Back Better legislation. Prospects for that package are dim, however, and it’s unclear whether the intervention money would be authorized separately.)

Altogether, the share of Covid-19 relief dollars going to violence intervention is small — a National League of Cities running tally of city spending indicated in February that only about 2 percent was going to all public-safety measures. Violence-intervention advocates are lobbying for more over the three years of federal grants.

Still, the direct investment of millions is unprecedented, as well as the White House’s endorsement. “It provides permission for that mayor or for that governor who may fear being considered ‘soft on crime’” to back these strategies, says Tomi Hiers, a vice president at the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

Much is at stake as these one-time cash infusions flow. If results follow, there’s hope that once the Covid-19 relief money dries up, lawmakers and officials will make community-based violence-prevention solutions a regular feature in budgets.

“There’s a tremendous amount of pressure because this has to work,” says Lakeesha Eure, director of the mayor’s office of violence prevention in Newark, N.J. “It cannot fail.”

White House Meetings

To help seize this opportunity, the White House has brought together 15 national grant makers in the Community Violence Intervention Collaborative launched last summer. This group has met three times with Biden Domestic Policy Adviser Susan Rice, other White House officials, mayors, law-enforcement officials, and others to consider violence-intervention efforts in 16 cities and jurisdictions where officials have earmarked significant funds. Cities involved include metropolises such as Chicago and Los Angeles as well as smaller places like Rapid City, S.D., and Baton Rouge, La.

Drawing on the nearly $7 million that the philanthropies have committed so far, the collaborative is funding four Black-led groups to help intervention programs scale and strengthen their work. Organizations are getting support to stabilize budgets, train new frontline workers, and identify and secure additional funding.

The collaborative also is connecting programs to learn from each other and build partnerships. Ultimately, it aims to knit together groups as a complement to policing, says Aqeela Sherrills, chief adviser to the collaborative.

“We recognize that law enforcement alone doesn’t have the ability to prevent and reduce crime,” says Sherrills, a former Los Angeles gang member who co-founded the Amer-I-Can Program to negotiate gang peace treaties around the country. “Traditionally, when you say ‘public safety,’ people think ‘police.’ But the reality is that law enforcement is one part of an ecosystem of safety that really needs strategic investment.”

The collaborative, which is housed at the nonprofit intermediary Hyphen, includes the Joyce, Annie E. Casey, and MacArthur foundations, longstanding proponents of community-created gun-violence solutions. Additional members include the Ballmer Group, Open Society Foundations, Arnold Ventures, and other grant makers that have been focused more broadly on criminal-justice reform. The Ballmer Group recently committed $18 million to the four groups directing the training and assistance for the White House collaborative: Cities United, the Community Based Public Safety Collective, the Health Alliance for Violence Intervention, and the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform.

Another national source of new dollars: Everytown for Gun Safety, the nonprofit largely funded by philanthropist Michael Bloomberg, which last year said it is doubling to $25 million over five years its grants to intervention programs in 100 cities.

In some cities, local philanthropy is also stepping up. Two leaders of Black and Jewish philanthropy in Hartford — JoAnn Price, a co-founder of Fairview Capital, and Stephen Bayer, a former top executive of the Jewish Federation of Greater Hartford — are spearheading a newly launched institute to train frontline violence-interruption workers in the city and the state. It’s named in honor of Carl Hardrick, a Hartford resident known for negotiating gang truces in cities nationwide but who lost his 19-year-old grandson to violence last year.

Also, the Hartford Foundation and Dalio Education — the grant maker led by Barbara Dalio, wife of Connecticut hedge-fund investor Ray Dalio — put $4.5 million into an effort with the city of Hartford that will, among other things, expand the number of frontline workers at Compass Youth Collaborative, which has a violence-interruption program.

Newark Community Street Team, which does a range of violence-interruption work, has received grants of about $1 million each from the Victoria Foundation, a local grant maker, and Prudential, which is based in the city. “Philanthropy is coming in full throttle right now,” says Daamin X, director of field operations for the group. “They’re stepping in because of the confidence they get from the investment of the federal government. And seeing us being able to navigate that and cross our t’s and dot our i’s.”

Other advocates say philanthropy writ large has failed to embrace community-based solutions to violence. What’s needed, they say, is collaborative and expansive efforts akin to what has advanced criminal-justice reform in recent years.

Oddly, government has come to embrace community-based solutions to violence before philanthropy, says Fatimah Loren Dreier, executive director of the Health Alliance for Violence Intervention, a support organization for hospital-based violence-intervention programs such as Hartford Communities That Care.

“I think this is an ideal situation for philanthropy,” Dreier says. “You’ve got a big opportunity to address an equity issue that impacts people of color every single day. And you have at the center of solutions people of color who are doing incredible work. They are heroes.”

Return on Investment

There’s no conclusive research about whether violence interruption works. “The evidence is pretty thin on the efficacy of violence-interruption programs on their own,” said John MacDonald, a University of Pennsylvania professor of criminology, in a survey of more than 60 criminal-justice experts in which the majority had no opinion on their effectiveness. “At the same time, they are worth trying for they provide community-led action to try and curb violence in neighborhoods.”

Charles Fain Lehman of the Manhattan Institute says while there is stronger evidence to suggest that summer-jobs programs or cleaning up vacant lots will reduce violence, intervention strategies are worth trying. They are, however, not easy to execute well.

Courtesy Hartford Communities That Care

“You have to identify the right people with the right social capital in a community, and that’s an extremely complicated proposition,” Lehman says. “Running one of these programs is pretty hard compared to, say, putting a cop on the corner.”

The White House calls for states and localities to invest in the interventions, noting that in case studies, community programs have been associated with reductions in violence of as much as 60 percent.

In Connecticut, when lawmakers were weighing whether Medicaid funds could be used for community violence-interruption work, Andrew Woods presented cost-benefit analyses for his group’s work. For every dollar invested in Hartford Communities, Medicaid saves $10 on care and assistance for gunshot victims, according to a study by Social Capital Valuations, a nonprofit evaluator.

“We wanted to show that we could save the state and taxpayers money,” Woods says. The legislation passed unanimously. Groups in Connecticut will soon have a revenue stream not subject to the whims of politics or private grant makers.

More could be done, Woods says, with more workers in the field. And there’s more money out there: He’s at work on a proposal for another federal grant that could add another four staff members to Hartford Communities.