Philanthropy often backs an idea or strategy with the hope of proving its effectiveness and then winning public dollars for it. In Chicago, that hope has been partially fulfilled: State, local, and city agencies are investing about $150 million this year in a variety of community violence-intervention strategies that philanthropy is road-testing.
Combined with nearly $50 million from a philanthropy collaborative and millions more from individual donors, Chicago’s decades-old violence-intervention field is enjoying a stability it could only imagine previously.
Gun-safety advocates are looking beyond Congress to the courts and state legislatures and have expanded their playbook to include things like media campaigns and grassroots violence prevention. There are signs it might be working. Read more:
“It’s been great for us,” says Terrance Henderson, coordinator of street-outreach workers — sometimes called “violence interrupters” — for Chicago CRED, a violence-prevention group backed by philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs. Henderson, a former gang member, is a 10-year veteran of street outreach. “The outreach world used to be like a gang unto itself because we were fighting for funding.”
Chicago is one of the most robust examples of the change in fortunes for violence-intervention programs. The federal gun-safety legislation passed this summer in Congress included $250 million for violence intervention, and local jurisdictions have earmarked millions in federal Covid-19 relief funds for the work. Other cities committing significant sums to violence intervention include Atlanta, Indianapolis, Memphis, Newark, and Philadelphia. Indianapolis officials are crediting a big drop in violence so far this year with their use of such funds for violence intervention.
Meanwhile, a group of more than a dozen national philanthropies — including headliners such as the Ford, Kresge, and Annie E. Casey foundations — is working with the White House to use the new federal funds to build a system of intervention programs in 14 cities. Also, the U.S. House passed this fall a measure for $5 billion in funding for intervention; the bill’s fate in the Senate is uncertain.
While research is promising, most experts say data does not yet conclusively confirm the effectiveness of violence intervention nationally or in Chicago. There are concerns that unskilled newcomers will jump into the work to tap the new money available. Covid-relief dollars will dry up in a few years, and small groups already say they’re having a hard time accessing the grants. Meanwhile, some in philanthropy are already restless.
For now, however, the idea is winning new attention and backing. “People are seeing that community violence intervention has an impact that they care about,” says Ellen Alberding, president of the Joyce Foundation.
“It’s emerging as a bipartisan middle ground that Republicans and Democrats can align around” in the same way they found common ground on criminal-justice reform, says Fatimah Loren Dreier, executive director of the Health Alliance for Violence Intervention, a support organization for hospital-based violence-intervention programs. Walmart recently has supported such work, and it’s bringing other conservative philanthropic interests to the table, Dreier notes.
Bringing together philanthropies with conservative and liberal values “was a winning strategy for criminal-justice reform,” she adds. “And I think we can do something similar in community violence prevention.”
Philanthropy Steps In
Joyce and the Polk Bros. and MacArthur foundations spearheaded the 2016 creation of the Partnership for Safe and Peaceful Communities, a group of more than 50 philanthropists, grant makers, and businesses that has invested more than $115 million in public-safety strategies in Chicago, chiefly violence intervention.
The collaborative came together as the city’s homicide rate soared to 1990s levels. Also, community tensions with police had boiled over in 2015 with the release of a videotape showing a white Chicago police officer fatally shooting Laquan McDonald, a Black teenager, 16 times.
Officials from six grant makers gathered around a table at the MacArthur Foundation’s iconic, 19th-century headquarters in downtown Chicago. Others soon joined, and the gathering quickly outgrew its space. “Every time we met, we had to have a bigger table — literally,” says Gillian Darlow, head of Polk Bros.
At the time, grassroots violence-prevention groups in the city were coalescing under the leadership of Metropolitan Family Services, a large social-service agency. Also, the Heartland Alliance, another direct-service organization, was working with the University of Chicago crime lab to develop a program, READI, that brings together employment support with significant mental-health treatment.
Over the years, these two groups have worked with the Partnership for Safe and Peaceful Communities to build an infrastructure for more than 20 groups, providing technical assistance and such basics as health insurance and credit. Also, philanthropy has funded academies to train outreach workers, case managers, and victims’ advocates — efforts to professionalize a field hurt previously by fits-and-starts funding.
The foundation collaborative is paying for extensive evaluation of programs to identify the best strategies. Results are encouraging, if not definitive. “We’ve spent a lot of money [on evaluation], and it’s still unclear. I can’t say it’s a slam dunk,” says Joyce’s Alberding.
The millions in new funding means violence intervention will be judged — particularly in the media — by whether it can turn around whole neighborhoods and the city itself. Yet there are only a few hundred outreach workers on the street and roughly 25,000 people likely to take the life of another or be shot themselves, according to University of Chicago data.
Also, just one shooting can trigger weeks of retaliatory killings that make a year of success look like failure. “One guy coming out of jail that you didn’t know about can rip up your neighborhood for three months,” says Teny Gross, a veteran of three decades of intervention work and the executive director of the Institute for Nonviolence in Chicago.
Bringing together philanthropies with conservative and liberal values “was a winning strategy for criminal-justice reform. And I think we can do something similar in community violence prevention.”
Philanthropy, too, can have unrealistic expectations, says Tawa Mitchell, a MacArthur program officer and one of the leaders of the partnership. “Boards are like: ‘Three years and y’all didn’t solve gun violence? Maybe it’s not working.’”
“Funders don’t blink an eye at funding education reform for 25 years,” Mitchell adds, but such commitment is a harder sell when the conversation is about a young Black man with criminal convictions and guns in his past. “People see him as a failure of bad choices.”
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.