Community Violence Interrupters need funding, yes. And time and support, too.

By Mona Mangat , Vice President of Safety + Justice, LISC HQ

For those of us working in community safety and justice fields, a recent article on community violence intervention (CVI) for ProPublica and The New Yorker by journalist Alec MacGillis has sparked a lot of conversation around the virtual water cooler. MacGillis does an important job of describing the genesis of CVI and some of the groups that have helped put it on the national map—and how those frontline activists pushed the Biden administration to dedicate $100 million to supporting the work. It’s a tale that points to how complex and fraught with challenges and danger the history of CVI has been.

But no single article can really do that complexity justice. For one thing, as critical as the work of a Roca or a Cure Violence is (two of the groups featured in the article), CVI models take time and painstaking adaptation to work in each community. The operation and success of CVI groups are inextricably linked to hyper-local histories, landscapes, populations—all the conditions on the ground—and just as important, to the local leaders of each group.

Individual violence interrupters, like Dante Johnson of Safe Streets/Belair-Edison in Baltimore and Taylor Paul of the RVA League for Safer Streets in Richmond, VA, for example, have a huge bearing on how a CVI approach develops, gets scaled and ultimately, improves lives and changes communities. The lion’s share of the dangerous and critical work they do is building relationships, which takes time, especially when you’re working with a population that has been as brutalized by discrimination, economic privation and over-policing as most of these communities are. That outreach, which is everything in this space, will take up a significant chunk of the federal government’s three-year grant phase.

Don’t get me wrong: it's a big deal, and an imperative step in the right direction, for these groups to get federal dollars. But dedicated capacity building support, and time to make effective use of those funds, are equally imperative. It’s a privilege to be part of the effort to expand this work and support the extraordinary people who carry it out.

Attending the 2023 U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs (OJP) 's Community Violence Intervention and Prevention Grantee Conference from? Stop by our Safety + Justice booth and say hello to Mona Mangat + learn more about our CVI work at LISC!