Indianapolis hit record-high murder rates in recent years, breaking the all-time record in 2021 with 251 homicides, making it one of the most violent cities per capita in the United States. The spike reflects a national increase in gun violence during the pandemic that experts attribute to a range of factors including disruption in people’s work and personal lives, an increase in gun sales, and mental health issues.
But the city is now in the midst of a promising experiment, led by faith leaders, with politicians, police, and residents all committed to reducing gun violence.
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Indianapolis hit record-high murder rates in recent years, breaking the all-time record in 2021 with 251 homicides, making it one of the most violent cities per capita in the United States. The spike reflects a national increase in gun violence during the pandemic that experts attribute to a range of factors including disruption in people’s work and personal lives, an increase in gun sales, and mental health issues. But the city is now in the midst of a promising experiment, led by faith leaders, with politicians, police, and residents all committed to reducing gun violence.
The city government’sprogram to combat gun violence is a yearslong effort that has required unflagging community organizing and building the political clout of neighborhood residents.Spearheaded by the nonprofit Faith in Indiana, the program is showing encouraging preliminary findings; the city has seen a 15 percent year-on-year homicide reduction. Faith in Indiana — whose $1.5 million annual budget is funded in part by the Ford and Robert Wood Johnson foundations, the Heartland Fund, and other philanthropic organizations — is part of the multifaith, multiracial national network Faith in Action.
When Indianapolis received $419 million in federal relief money in 2021, Faith in Indiana helped ensure that about $115 million would be devoted to the gun-violence reduction and mental health services it has been advocating for.
“Over the years, we built lots and lots of relationships with everyday people and started to build some serious power,” says Rosie Bryant, a former community organizer at Faith in Indiana who now works nationwide to advance similar efforts.
The city’s success in acquiring funding illustrates grassrootsgroups’ lurching progress in the battle against gun violence. For decades, political leaders have ignored the fact that gun homicides are concentrated in Black and Hispanic city neighborhoods. Generally, it has been mass shootings — often in predominantly white communities like Newtown, Conn., and Parkland, Fla. — that have captured headlines, dictated most of the policy agenda, and benefited from much of both government and philanthropic funding.
Now, however, local branches of religious organizations like Faith in Action and Live Free USA, led by Black people and other underrepresented groups, are seeing some change. As a result of community organizing and savvy advocacy, grassroots nonprofits in Birmingham, Ala., Oakland, Calif., and other cities are gaining recognition and financing for the community-based programs to reduce shootings they have supported and carried out for decades.
Faith groups are not the only ones to advocate for these programs, often referred to as community-violence intervention. Typically, these programs hire outreach workers, who may have been gang members or felons, to offer intensive coaching and tailored services to give alternatives to the very small percentage of a city’s population most likely to perpetrate or be victims of gun violence.
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But support for these efforts from faith leaders has been crucial, given the moral authority they have traditionally held in Black neighborhoods, notably during the civil-rights movement. Black ministers also played a pivotal role in what has been called “the Boston Miracle” in the mid-90s, when African American clergy, police, and government officials joined forces to reduce gun violence among young people.
Federal Boost
The work of grassroots groups got a big lift in July when President Biden signed the Safer Communities Act, which earmarks $250 million for local organizations working to deter gun violence.
In addition to the federal measure, the Biden administration called upon foundations active in gun safety — including the Ballmer Group, Joyce Foundation, and Schusterman Family Philanthropies — to help expand anti-violence efforts in 16 cities. The 18-month program ended in December, as planned, and may have a snowballing impact into the future as foundations continue to make grants to deter gun violence. Philanthropies also continue their funding to fight gun violence using other measures.
Other federal grants not previously earmarked for violence intervention can now be used to finance local anti-violence efforts. Local violence-intervention groups say they are having difficulty obtaining this funding. However, on paper, at least, billions of federal, state, and local money and funding from multiple foundations are now available to help local groups curb violence.
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‘Not All the Way There’
Mike McBride, a pastor and executive director of racial-justice nonprofit Live Free USA, works with local groups nationwide, including Faith in Indiana. He sees signs of progress in the new money from government and philanthropy. Yet thepolicy agenda is still largely set by national gun-safety groups, he says. Though he acknowledges recent efforts of groups like Michael Bloomberg’s Everytown for Gun Safety and Fund for a Safer Future to put people of color in leadership positions, he still sees a long road.
“There has to be a racial-justice, racial-equity conversation with philanthropy around this work,” says McBride. “How can a gun-control group with no racial equity be considered a leader in one of the most important racial-justice issues of our time?”
“Violence could be prevented with different political choices,” he says, expressing his frustration with a lack of action by political leaders. In pursuing focused community-organizing strategies, faith-based groups are trying to address these lapses by taking a more active stance in pursuing their agenda.
Ultimately, McBride says, more work needs to be done to ensure that anti-violence programs become so well accepted and compelling that people who say, “We got to have more police,” instead say, “We have to fund peace.”
Jeffrey Brown, whom McBride considers a mentor, was a member of the Boston TenPoint Coalition, a group of ministers who became an integral part of the city’s successful anti-violence program in the ‘90s, when youth homicides fell by 63 percent in two years. He has been advocating for such community efforts for 30 years.
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In July, when Biden signed the new anti-violence act, Brown told the Guardian that he felt “hope” that “we’re being heard.” But a few months down the road, he now says, “I’m not sure we’re all the way there.”
He points to a common complaint of activists, who say that money does not trickle down to pay the frontline workers needed to operate successful violence-intervention efforts.
Those workers are the key to the approach that has proven successful, say Brown and others: The programs treat potential offenders as human beings who are “not to be thrown away as if they’re of no value,” as one community group leader puts it.
Though clergy and street outreach workers will often invest the time and heartache that the work requires for little or no money because of a sense of moral obligation, it sometimes comes at great personal cost, according to research.
Moreover, Brown and others point to overarching social problems that feed gun violence and must be addressed at the same time. “You can always bring people together to reduce violence or stop a wave of violence, but if you don’t deal with the ground that is tilled around violence” — failed housing policies, unemployment and chronic underemployment, poor health care, subpar schools — “then you will see it pop up again and again as generations change and as personnel changes,” Brown warns.
“There are societal woes we have to fix,” agrees the Reverend Darren Faulkner, program manager of the nonprofit KC Common Good, which helps coordinate violence-prevention efforts in Missouri’s largest city. “In Kansas City, there are areas of our city that have been disproportionately neglected, redlined. Those communities have suffered a great deal over a long period of time.”
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Religious leaders have born witness to the daily toll of gun violence, Faulkner says. “Our faith community happens to be the one that is burying these people being killed, who must go and provide counseling to family members who are losing loved ones. These are ones we, maybe, saw grow up in the church.”
“So we know these people,” he continues. “Our faith community is very much a part of the solution.”
A Health-Based Focus
In some regions of the country, faith groups are putting their advocacy muscle into galvanizing doctors, public health officials, and others to install new programs in hospitals. The goal: to ensure that people who suffer gunshot wounds don’t retaliate against anyone involved in their shootings and set off a continuing ripple of violence.
In 2022, Birmingham hit its highest murder rate in decades, higher than larger cities like Chicago or Atlanta.
Onoyemi Williams is leading Faith in Action, Alabama’s community violence-intervention strategy. Faith in Action Alabama receives funding for its $1 million budget from the Alabama Civil Justice Foundation, the Voting Rights Lab, the Alabama Power Foundation, and the Just Trust.
Williams has worked for Faith in Action since 2016, helping find ways to get residents politically involved, including starting groups that meet with local political leaders to discuss hyperlocal problems. Faith in Action also founded Black United Youth, which gathers social-media influencers — sometimes in a local tattoo parlor — to figure out how to educate young people about politics.
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Recently, she has coordinated advocacy work with other faith leaders to enable outreach workers to contact gunshot victims before they are released from hospital care. The goal is to prevent them or their associates from any retaliatory shootings. The hospital recovery period is also an opportune moment to offer victims services that promote positive behavior change.
In Birmingham, the county health department and city government, using some federal funds, have contributed more than $3 million for a new hospital-focused program after years of appeals from grassroots groups.
“Some of our best advocates are trauma surgeons because they’re the ones seeing the carnage,” says Williams. Noting the disproportionate number of Black victims, she says, “It’s a health-disparities issue.”
Indeed, homicide is the leading cause of death for Black males 44 years old and younger, according to the Centers for Disease Control, while heart disease and cancer are the leading causes of death for non-Hispanic white males.
The trial program, which will take place at the University of Alabama at Birmingham Hospital and be run by the nonprofit Offender Alumni Association, a group aimed at reducing recidivism, is approved for one year. However, the city and health department have committed funding for an expansion of the program for two additional years if the first year is successful.
“Often Black and brown communities are not given the infrastructure dollars they need, so they’re set up to fail,” Williams says. “This is the first time in a long time that the Black and brown community received this type of money for a program to be operated properly.”
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Parkland and Miami: a Tale of Two Cities
Perhaps the most stark example of the ways race has played a part in the response to gun violence can be seen in the aftermath of the shooting at a high school in Parkland, Fla. At the time, state lawmakers raced to provide school security and other services in the state to the tune of $400 million.
While the nonprofit Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence praised some aspects of the 2018 state legislative changes following the shooting, in 2020, it critiqued the state’s failure to “invest in community-violence intervention strategies,” which would benefit cities like Miami.
Rhonda Thomas, a co-founder with her husband of Miami’s New Generation Missionary Baptist Church, had long been working to reduce gun violence. She says she has spent a lot of time counseling parents who have lost children in shootings. Violence had also affected her own family: Her nephew was shot and killed in gun crossfire.
When the Parkland shooting occurred, Thomas — who is executive director of Faith in Florida, a local branch of Faith in Action — decided to go there, less than an hour away from her church. She soon saw for herself that a mass shooting was not looked at the same way as an individual shooting in a Black community. The media presents these individual shootings as Black-on-Black crime, she says, not as “a mother or father just lost a child to a senseless shooting, just like a mass shooting.” But Thomas saw commonalities — and also found a learning experience.
“Both communities experience trauma. Families experience trauma, kids experience trauma — trauma is trauma,” she says.
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The eye opener for Thomas was the reaction of the victims. “Children in urban communities look at gun violence as if it’s a norm. They’re used to it, they’re numb, as opposed to what I saw take place in Parkland. That was not a normal feeling. Which is right. It should never be a norm.”
Parkland students became politically active and pushed to bring about change. Thomas supported efforts to bring the two groups together to exchange experiences. At the 2018 March for Our Lives rally in Washington, D.C., the Parkland survivors acknowledged their “privilege” and shared the stage with “those communities who have always stared down the barrel of a gun,” as one Parkland survivor said.
“I wanted Black children to learn from that,” Thomas says. “It was a learning experience in the midst of a whole lot of hurt and pain.”
As a result of those encounters with Parkland residents, Thomas founded a youth program that encourages young people to become active in gun-violence reduction, educates them on how they are impacted, and involves them in voter registration. Thomas says she wants Black children to know “their voices are just as powerful” as whites’ and to “see themselves as part of democracy.”
Indy Goes All In
Making local residents a part of democracy — by assuming their inherent political power — was the first order of business for Faith in Indiana’s first organizer, Juard Barnes. He had taken the time to coordinate public forums, train grassroots leaders, and build relationships with government officials over the years. As a result, the organization had the ability to mobilize tens of thousands of voters on various issues.
As Barnes’s successor at the organization, Rosie Bryant knew that gun violence was an issue of primary importance to the city’s Black residents, so she helped the group take full advantage of its collective voice.
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“Why should the mayor listen to us?” Bryant asks with palpable enthusiasm. “Well, we have the votes that he needs! That’s why.” News reports highlighting the high toll of gun violence in the city make clear that the issue had also become a significant public-relations problem for the city.
McBride, based in Oakland, was at the time head of Faith in Action’s Live Free campaign, focused on addressing gun violence and the mass incarceration of Black and brown people. Oakland’s anti-violence program, which was associated with a 31.5 percent homicide reduction in the city over six years, had become a nationwide model. At the invitation of Faith in Indiana, he visited Indianapolis three times to speak to large forums — some with hundreds in attendance — as well as small groups about his experiences working locally. Faith in Indiana organized trips to Oakland and Los Angeles for the mayor’s staff and other community leaders to see effective anti-violence efforts in action.
After four years of public organizing and behind-the-scenes conversations, Mayor Joe Hogsett agreed to put in place some of Faith in Action’s proposals. In 2018, he created a department to oversee the program and hired a project director, and the city brought on several outreach workers called “peacemakers.”
Even with that victory, activists said they still had to work hard to make sure their proposals made a difference. For one thing, the city’s investment of less than $3 million a year in the program was insufficient for a city of 870,000 that had a homicide rate of 24.3 per 100,000 residents. In contrast, Oakland’s program was spending $8 million annually in a city of half the size (423,000 residents) with a comparable murder rate of 23.3.
Bryant realized that hiring an outside expert to oversee progress had been essential to Oakland’s success. Her group worked to persuade Mayor Hogsett to bring in David Muhammad, head of the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform, which oversees multiple anti-violence programs around the country, including in Oakland.
Racial-justice demonstrations following the murder of George Floyd by police in 2020 encouraged continuing advancement of the program. That year, when agreeing to expand the program to reduce gun violence, Hogsett acknowledged his collaborative relationship with Faith in Indiana in a tweet: “I have met with Faith in Indiana for many years, and they have been invaluable partners in pushing our administration to make meaningful change for the betterment of police-community relationships and in furtherance of peace on our streets.”
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Keeping the Pressure On
Muhammad carefully tracks his programs’ data and is cooperating on research on the Indianapolis program with Indiana University Bloomington. Although it is difficult to definitively link the program to a decline in violence, Muhammad says Indianapolis has seen a 15 percent reduction in homicides from 2021 to 2022 and a drop in fatal shootings of more than 12 percent.
He credits the commitment of Bryant as well as the mayor and his staff for this initial success. He meets monthly with the Indianapolis mayor, deputy mayor, the mayor’s chief of staff, the police chief, and the director of the public health and safety office, which manages the strategy.
“In the last 15 years, there’s not even been a 10 percent reduction, year over year, in murders, so we’re very excited by the progress,” Muhammad says.
The greatest contribution of activists and religious organizations has been “creating the public support, maintaining public support, and maintaining pressure on elected officials and policymakers,” he says.
Indeed, Faith in Indiana did not stop its advocacy after the city adopted the program. It has continued to meet with the mayor to see how best to expand the program. In March 2021, the funds from the American Rescue Plan, the federal pandemic relief plan, answered that question.
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Bryant has become regional organizing manager of Live Free USA, overseeing chapters across a broad swath of the country. But she still lives in Indianapolis, where she continues to tout the anti-violence work that has the police department, prosecutor’s office, several community centers, and the mayor working together to make the strategy a success.
Bryant tells the story of how, at a certain point in her education, she decided to become a social worker. She wanted to change the world, she says.
“But what if the world could change itself?” she now asks. “What if people fought for their own liberation and their own freedom?”
Reporting for this article was underwritten by a Lilly Endowment grant to enhance public understanding of philanthropy. The Chronicle is solely responsible for the content. See more about the Chronicle, the grant, how our foundation-supported journalism works, and our gift-acceptance policy.
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