It’s yet another White House policy that makes no sense: Why would the U.S. Department of Justice slash funding for gun violence prevention and public safety programs that have been shown to make American cities safer?
On Day One of his second term, President Donald Trump shut down the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention and since then has made it clear that gun rights — not gun violence prevention — are the administration’s priority. In his first weeks in office he issued a “Protecting Second Amendment Rights” executive order and created a Second Amendment Task Force “to advance President Trump’s pro-gun agenda and protect gun owners from overreach,” as Pam Bondi, the attorney general, put it at the time.
In addition, the administration chopped over half of all federal funding for community violence intervention (CVI) programs, cutting $158 million in grants to organizations across the country, as Reuters reported. CVI grantees whose funding was cut weren’t given much insight into why, and were simply told that their work doesn’t align with the priorities of the Department of Justice.
Michael-Sean Spence, the managing director of community safety initiatives at Everytown for Gun Safety, isn’t spending a lot of time puzzling over the administration’s moves. Instead, his organization is doing what it can to support the work of organizations devastated by the funding cuts. The Everytown Community Safety Fund recently rolled out 501c3 grants totalling $2.67 million “to sustain and expand community-based violence intervention (CVI) programs across the country.”
It’s another initiative by a philanthropic organization to keep violence prevention work going at a time when federal interest in those efforts, which were a focus for public-philanthropic partnerships under the previous administration, has evaporated (see the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation’s $25 million gift to the Fund for a Safer Future earlier this year).
“As Washington turns its back on communities, Everytown is helping to ensure that life-saving community violence intervention organizations can continue their work,” Spence said when the new grants were announced. “Cities that have invested in these trusted, proven strategies are seeing gun violence decline — but shortsighted federal cuts are threatening that progress. We will not allow politics to come before people — or dismantle what works.”
Everytown’s community-based approach to violence prevention
Everytown for Gun Safety is the largest gun violence prevention program in the country. It was created in 2013 when Mayors Against Illegal Guns, which was founded by then-Mayors Michael Bloomberg of New York and Thomas Menino of Boston, merged with Moms Demand Action. Bloomberg, who ranked 13th on the Forbes 400 list of the richest people in America this year, continues to provide financial and strategic support for Everytown for Gun Safety, along with the many other causes he supports. Everytown is the umbrella for a number of entities that engage in both 501c3 and 501c4 activities, including research, public education, policy advocacy and support for political candidates.
The Everytown Community Safety Fund, which Spence spearheaded in 2019, is one of those entities. The community-based violence intervention organizations it supports take a public health approach to gun violence, and work to prevent it from occurring or reoccurring, “focusing both on firearm access and underlying risk factors that contribute to gun violence.” Since 2019, the fund has given over $15.7 million to 142 organizations across 72 cities. Along with funding, Everytown also provides capacity-building in the form of technical support, expert guidance and convenings so grantees can share ideas and build community. The Everytown Community Safety Fund’s philanthropic partners include the Fidelity Foundation, major-league sports organizations like the NBA Social Justice Coalition, the NFL and the NHL Foundation, as well as corporate funders and individual donors.
Community Safety Fund grantees deploy a number of approaches, including hospital-based violence intervention, street outreach initiatives and environmental design programs to create safe and welcoming neighborhood spaces.
Many of the interventions focus on young people, offering them afterschool and summer activities, employment opportunities, mentoring and other support. “These programs provide the opportunity to lower the intervention age as we recognize there are more and more kids that are being impacted by violence,” Spence said. “Not just directly, necessarily, but they’re hearing the gunshots at night. They’re hearing the gunfire in their classrooms while they’re taking tests. They’re being impacted by the drills as they prepare for the unfortunate tragedy that could befall their school.”
Federal cuts undermine an evidence-based approach to gun violence
Many small, community based CVI programs operate on a shoestring and the DOJ cuts threaten their very existence, in some cases. Of the 69 CVI programs that were impacted, a third were Everytown Community Safety Fund grantees. “The cuts had an immediate impact,” Spence said. “Many of these organizations had to cut staff, many of them had to cut programs, many of them had to reduce their outreach work and haven’t been able to serve the communities in the way they had prior.”
He pointed to one grantee, the Miami-based Circle of Brotherhood. “As of September of this year, their entire staff has been furloughed, including their founding director,” Spence said. “That’s the sort of immediate and tragic impact that many of our programs are suffering. For other organizations, it wasn’t as drastic, but many have had to cut programs that have really made a difference in the lives of people and communities. We’re seeing this across the nation.”
The cuts are baffling, because CVI strategies have been shown to be effective. “These are programs that have played a critical role in the historic decline we’ve seen in gun violence over the last few years,” Spence said. “Last year alone, we saw a 14% decline. In city after city — we’re talking about Mayor Bass in L.A., we’re talking about Mayor Johnson in Chicago, Mayor Scott in Baltimore — all of them have publicly noted the collaboration between local law enforcement and CVI as critical to them achieving the success they were able to.”
The Washington Post confirmed this point in a report about the steep drop in homicides in Baltimore. The city’s mayor Brandon Scott, who considers gun violence a public health threat, has treated that threat “at the source by investing in violence interrupters, community organizations and trauma-informed support systems in impacted neighborhoods,” according to the Post.
Spence hopes that the new grants from the Everytown Community Safety Fund will patch some of the holes the DOJ cuts have created. The dollars will provide continued support for existing partner organizations and 15 of last year’s grantees; a large portion will go to 14 new grantees.
Still, Spence acknowledged that the grants won’t cover all of the need. “We can’t sustain [these organizations], but we can ensure that they can at least keep the lights on to make it to the next day,” he said. “We’re proud to try to step into the gap and to provide this lifeline, but we know that we can’t do it on our own.”
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Gun violence prevention: Philanthropy can’t take its foot off the gas
Every day, 125 people in the U.S. are killed by guns, and twice as many are shot or wounded, according to Everytown. Can philanthropy make a difference on a problem that seems intractable? The good news is that a number of funders have made violence prevention a priority over the years. And some public health funders now recognize gun violence as the public health crisis it is, and have added prevention to their portfolios. A key commitment this year was the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation’s transformative $25 million gift to the Fund for a Safer Future, the country’s only donor collaborative that focuses exclusively on this issue.
Still, daily headlines report shootings at schools, places of worship, music venues, grocery stores and just down the street — acts of violence that happen over and over and leave us all numb. In 2022, my colleague Philip Rojc explored why it seems as if philanthropy has made so little progress on mitigating gun violence, and three years later, with a very different administration in Washington, progress seems even more elusive.
But Everytown’s Spence, like others who work on this issue every day, believe there has been progress. He sees it demonstrated on the streets of big cities and rural towns, where small, local CVI organizations are succeeding in making communities safer. But he worries that slow, incremental progress could be swept away.
“These programs have shown real success,” he said. “That’s why it’s so important that not only Everytown but our philanthropy partners and corporate partners sustain the investment, because we see what they’ve been able to achieve with the right resources. The risk is that if we take our foot off the gas, we could return to even more dangerous times. No one wants that.”
