Everytown for Gun Safety, a national gun violence prevention organization, announced Thursday that its Community Safety Fund is awarding over $2 million to 34 community-based violence intervention organizations across the country. Two of the grantees — Getting Out Staying Out (GOSO) and Not Another Child (NAC)–are located in Harlem.
GOSO is one of fifteen nonprofits receiving a support grant of $100,000 over two years. NAC, a past recipient, will receive a further $40,000 of funding this year via a sustainer grant.
Community violence intervention (CVI) encompasses a variety of strategies through which community members with lived experience of gun violence provide services and mentorship to people most at risk of engaging in violence or becoming a victim of such violence.
“The organizations we support primarily do street outreach or hospital-based violence intervention, or work in the youth space, providing cognitive behavioral therapy, as well as helping to bring the programming and create the safe spaces that we know [are] necessary to create environments where gun violence can be reduced,” explained Michael-Sean Spence, Managing Director of Community Safety Initiatives at Everytown.
Research has shown that CVI programs can be effective in reducing violence. For example, a John Jay College of Criminal Justice study found that two neighborhoods in New York with CVI sites had a steeper decline in gun violence than comparable neighborhoods without sites.
Everytown first began funding CVI groups in 2019, after Spence created the Community Safety Fund (CSF) in order to boost investment in CVI efforts. Since then, the CSF has awarded $13.57 million to 136 CVI programs. Spence explained that the money for the fund comes from Everytown’s budget and from donations by individuals, corporations, and foundations.
CVI has become an increasingly popular approach to addressing gun violence in Black and Brown communities, which suffer from disproportionately high homicide rates due to decades of disinvestment.
“When you look at the demographics of our grantees in the field at large, the vast majority are led by Black and Brown individuals, led by individuals who have personal or vicarious trauma from the experience of gun violence,” Spence said.
Omar Jackson, GOSO’s Chief Advocacy Officer and director of its CVI program SAVE East Harlem, explained that GOSO will use the money to enhance their CVI programming, which currently serves three NYCHA housing developments, Harlem Hospital, the Horizon juvenile detention center, and the local high school Democracy Prep.
The money will go towards establishing a more regular presence at Democracy Prep, providing stipends for its junior violence interrupters program, and investing in staff development and wellness opportunities, Jackson explained.
“Now that we know that we have this additional funding, it’ll only help us grow and do things on another level,” he said.
“The Getting Out Staying Out (GOSO) program has become an integral part of our efforts to improve outcomes for young people in my district by providing a pathway for education, employment and emotional wellbeing, and I am especially proud to see the program recognized as part of the latest cohort of Everytown Community Safety Fund grantees,” said U.S. Representative Adriano Espaillat (NY-13) in a press release.
Spence explained that the selection process was competitive, as CSF was initially considering almost 150 different organizations after it began soliciting applications in January. He said GOSO stood out because of its reputation in East Harlem and its track record working with at-risk youth.
“They are one of those programs that has the trust and credibility within East Harlem, the unique opportunity to identify and engage those at the highest risk, [and connect] them with resources and opportunity to change their life trajectory and produce more positive life outcomes,” he said.
“Omar is similarly a visionary leader, someone who I’ve seen doing this work without much acclaim for a very long time,” he added.
Supporting solutions to gun violence
Everytown’s investment in CVI is part of a growing trend. CVI programs have existed for decades, but funding has grown exponentially in recent years, especially in response to the pandemic era spike in homicides in 2020.
“Some of the folks within our network have been doing this work for ten, twenty, thirty years, and our grant is the first time they’ve received any sort of financial investment,” Spence said.
Jackson has witnessed this growth firsthand, as he was part of SAVE Harlem when it originally formed in 2016.
“When we first started out, we didn’t have the hospital component, we didn’t have the juvenile detention center [component], and we weren’t in schools. We were just on the ground inside of one housing development,” he said, noting that SAVE has grown from receiving around $250,000 per year in city funding to now receiving $2.4 million.
To evaluate the impact of the grants, Spence said that Everytown conducts a qualitative and quantitative assessment of the recipients.
“We have an Associate Director of Engagement and Assessment who surveys our programs regularly, [and] who also engages them in site visits and focus groups to gather that qualitative data that reflects their progress,” he explained.
In addition, Spence said, the recipients will complete a data-driven mid-grant survey one year into the grant, and an end of grant survey after the final year. Organizations will also have the opportunity to qualify for a third year of funding, as one of the main lessons Spence learned from the early years was that groups often require multiple years of funding to establish sustainable programs.
“What we then saw was that a lot of these programs were then reliant on our support for the programs they had launched with our investment. So we now afford folks a third year of support to help sustain their progress,” Spence explained.
This year, CSF is providing a total of $560,000 of third-year funding to 14 prior grantees, including Not Another Child.
“Programs like Not Another Child have shown not only promise but participation and impact. They’ve been responsive, and they’ve shown up, not only for their community, but for our network, and as a result of that, have been afforded another year of support,” Spence explained.
CSF is also providing $25,000 one-year grants to five organizations implementing an innovative gun violence prevention strategy within a public health framework.
“We can’t just rely on traditional strategies. We have to supplement [that] with innovative strategies that respond to the unique real time dynamics of communities and meet people where they are if we’re ultimately going to reduce gun violence,” Spence said.
Shannon Chaffers is a Report for America corps member and writes about gun violence for the Amsterdam News. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://bit.ly/amnews1.