Community Violence Intervention Public-Private One Table
Clients: Government Alliance for Safe Communities, Partnership for Peaceful Communities
Partners: BCG
Challenge: Community Violence Intervention (CVI) uses multidisciplinary strategies to engage individuals and groups to prevent and disrupt cycles of violence and retaliation. It establishes relationships between individuals and community assets to deliver services that save lives, address trauma, provide opportunity, and improve physical, social, and economic conditions to prevent violence.
Since 2017, Civic Consulting Alliance has worked with clients that catalyze CVI efforts across sectors. This work began with the launch of the Partnership for Safe and Peaceful Communities (PSPC), a coalition of more than 50 foundations and funders seeking to test innovative, evidence-informed strategies like CVI to reduce gun violence and establish an evidence base that paves the way for public funding to sustain the strategies that work.
The promising evidence developed by PSPC and funding provided through the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) provided a surge of investment for CVI strategies. Since 2021, Civic Consulting Alliance has supported the Government Alliance for Safe Communities (which includes representatives from the City of Chicago, Cook County, and the State of Illinois) to strategically coordinate a combined $350 million in ARPA investments to maximize the collective impact of public funding for CVI and other violence reduction and prevention initiatives.
In 2023, we partnered with BCG to work worked with the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago to bring the business community up to speed on CVI and helped with the foundational components to launch their Public Safety Task Force.
In late 2024, CVI reached a new historic level of collaboration. PSPC, CVI practitioners, and the Public Safety Task Force launched the Scaling Community Violence Intervention for a Safer Chicago (SC2) initiative to triple the level of CVI service across the city within the next five years.
Now, with all sectors at the table, there is a critical mass of funding for CVI. GASC, composed of entities that distribute public funds, asked Civic Consulting Alliance to develop a periodic cross-sector convening to ensure all entities are coordinating their funding, and aligned on expectations as each sector moved to support scaling CVI.
Action: Civic Consulting Alliance and BCG facilitated roundtable discussions that bring together stakeholders from the GASC, along with private funders (Partnership for Safe and Peaceful Communities), the business community (Civic Committee), and citywide Community Violence Intervention (CVI) providers (Chicago CRED, Metropolitan Peace Initiatives). This includes aligning on budget and funding needs for CVI, surfacing key challenges in the field such as organizational capacity building, and reaching a consensus on moving forward with the “one table” approach to scaling CVI in Chicago.
Result: The roundtables bring clarity on what funding is needed and from whom, coordinating legislative engagement, understanding approaches to data collection and program evaluation, and exploring collaborative efforts to increase support for organizational capacity building. With all sectors committed to working together to provide increased sustainable, flexible funding and capacity building support, the CVI field is well-positioned to scale its services and significantly increase community safety in the Chicago region.
