This Moment Belongs to the Work
Restoring Community Violence Intervention to Its Purpose
“They’re killing CVI. Not on purpose, but they’re killing it.”
— Local Violence Interrupter
REFLECTION FROM THE STEPS OF THE LINCOLN MEMORIAL
I’m exhausted. I’m closing out a month-long stretch of travel, meeting with Community Violence Intervention (CVI) practitioners, funders, researchers, journalists, and those of us called “experts,” all while launching my second book.
Now, sitting on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, looking out across the National Mall, I can’t help but think, as I always do here, about freedom. Not just the freedom Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of, but a freedom from the retaliatory gun violence that plagues communities around the country. A freedom that CVI has been specifically designed to help deliver. I pause to reflect and to gather strength for what comes next.
I entered this so-called CVI work in 2005, first within city government, launching the second and longest-standing Office of Violence Prevention (OVP) in the country. Later I founded Advance Peace, a non-profit organization dedicated to ending cyclical and retaliatory gun violence in urban neighborhoods across the United States.
I’ve seen CVI as a field and practice grow from the margins to the mainstream. Across the country, more than 80 OVPs have now been established, and thousands of highly skilled and trained community-rooted violence interrupters have been deployed to intervene in retaliatory gun violence conflicts in real-time. The result: Gun violence has been reduced. Many lives have been saved. Communities once consumed by despair now have hope. To communities living closest to the pain, CVI has proven indispensable—interrupting retaliatory gun violence, stabilizing volatile situations, and helping individuals change course in ways that make entire neighborhoods safer.
But this moment—amid federal funding cuts and political uncertainty about the future of CVI—is not just a test of CVI’s resilience. It is a test of its fidelity.
Whitney Young once said, “It’s better to be prepared for an opportunity and not have one than to have an opportunity and not be prepared.”
With all the challenges confronting CVI in this moment, it can be difficult to see opportunity. However, opportunity exists. Now is no better time to strengthen and recommit CVI to its priority focus: those at the center of retaliatory gun violence. Those of us working within this important ecosystem also have an opportunity to work smarter in our efforts to ensure that CVI is recognized and funded as a public safety necessity that meets the scale of the existing challenge.
In this moment, we must be prepared to seize these and the other opportunities before us. If we miss it, impacted communities will pay the price.
“THEY’RE KILLING CVI”
A young local CVI practitioner close to the work in Baltimore said this to me recently. I thought he meant it as praise. He didn’t.
“They’re killing CVI, bruh,” he said. “Not on purpose, but they’re killing it. It ain’t doing what it was called to do.”
He went on to describe how, in too many places, CVI has become a “money grab”—the “new hustle.” Millions of dollars are circulating under the CVI banner, but less of it is reaching those at the center of gun violence or to the individuals on the frontlines who serve them.
Here’s what this can look like on the ground:
A city awards CVI grant dollars to a long-standing youth development non-profit because it has name recognition and a strong grant-writing team. The program serves black and brown “at-risk” middle school students and teens—none of whom are at the center of gun violence, or likely to become directly impacted by this violence. To satisfy the CVI label, the organization adds a “street outreach” line to its website, hires two part-time staff with no neighborhood credibility, and begins reporting “engagement hours” with youth who were never at-risk of shooting or being shot. The city cites the program as a CVI success, even as shootings among the highest-risk young adults continue unabated.
A second example represents a county that awards CVI dollars from its American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funding to a reentry organization focused on workforce development for people recently released from jail or prison. The program helps with job readiness, housing navigation, and employment—good, important work. But none of its clients are involved in gun violence. Meanwhile, the city’s frontline outreach team—with years of relationships, active-shooting intelligence, and credible messengers deeply embedded and working with the highest-risk groups—is denied funding because the reentry provider has stronger political ties and a larger administrative operation. As a result, dozens of individuals driving retaliatory shootings remain unengaged.
Another example where a state CVI initiative awards a major contract to a policy and advocacy organization with no frontline experience in interrupting gun violence. The group rebrands itself as a provider of “CVI training and technical assistance,” despite having never engaged a firearm offender or operated a single credible messenger program. In this scenario, credible CVI practitioners on the ground continued being underfunded while an advocacy entity with political proximity—not practical expertise—becomes a primary beneficiary of CVI dollars.
Far too often, public funding for CVI gets scattered like seed across scores of well-meaning activities. For example, a city allocates $5M to CVI—just so that it can publicly claim that it “funded CVI”—-but does so in a way that divides that five million into two hundred politically expedient slivers of favor that does very little to increase public safety. In fact, this very act will most certainly prevent the required depth and dilute any accountability.
Cities and agencies that are serious about reducing retaliatory gun violence invest much differently. These cities fund fewer organizations at amounts that create conditions for delivering impactful results. In the local example above, this would mean allocating more resources to fewer organizations. Organizations that have trusted CVI experience and a history of delivering measurable results. That’s what disciplined public safety investment looks like.
If CVI continues to expand in ways like those described above–without clarity, focus, and discipline, its power will be impaired, and the field will forfeit its credibility.
THAT’S NOT JUST A MATTER OF INTEGRITY. IT’S A MATTER IF IMPACT.
Diluting CVI doesn’t just confuse the mission—it weakens the impact.
Yes, CVI is producing promising results. And these results are being achieved in environments where the work is rarely funded to match the scale of the challenge. Most CVI programs are expected to help support the transformation of cities with a fraction of the resources afforded to systems of criminalization: policing, prosecution, or corrections.
Now, add to that reality the drift we’re seeing—CVI funding increasingly directed toward populations outside its core purpose—and the impact is diminished further. CVI was developed to address gun violence occurring in our most impacted communities. Its focus was to be on those “driving” gun violence – or our “highest risk” individuals. Today, drift occurs where “highest risk” is defined by one’s exposure rather than involvement in gun violence. Drift also occurs where CVI is serving people solely because they live in under-resourced neighborhoods, or they attend schools near gun violence, or fit broad demographic or statistical profiles.
Don’t misunderstand me, these conditions matter—but they do not equal immediate participation in gun violence – and this is where CVI earns its name. CVI loses effectiveness when proximity replaces probability, when “highest risk” is defined by environment instead of behavior, and when eligibility is driven by demographics rather than real-time gun violence dynamics.
When dollars are stretched thin and misdirected, fewer of the people most likely to shoot or be shot are reached—and lives that could be transformed are missed. CVI must keep its focus on those involved in gun violence. We cannot scale CVI by broadening its mission; we can only scale it by deepening its precision.
There must be universal clarity about who CVI exists to serve. We must have tools to check fidelity and hold implementers accountable to that standard. And we must build evaluation systems that learn from this precision, measuring outcomes not by volume of participants, but by the lives CVI is keeping from being lost.
To fund CVI without these safeguards is to invest in drift. To define and protect its purpose is to invest in lasting peace—this is where the opportunity in this moment lies.
RETURN TO THE CENTER
Community Violence Intervention was never designed to serve everyone living in neighborhoods impacted by gun violence. It was built for a few: those at the most immediate and highest risk of gun violence—what we call within the APZone the “habitual” and recently “active” firearm offender whose actions pose a clear and present threat to public safety (actors who have avoided law enforcement reach).
Within the APZone, “highest risk” is not defined by exposure, environment, or demographic profile. It is defined by behavior, immediacy, and involvement within retaliatory gun violence conflict. Specifically, we are engaging individuals whose current actions, recent history, and social positioning place them at imminent risk of shooting someone or being shot.
This definition is grounded in four non-negotiable principles:
Immediacy: the risk is near-term, not long-range vulnerability
Predictability: patterns of behavior and credible intelligence signal likelihood
Present tense: violence is already unfolding—it is not hypothetical or someday
Accountability: the population is identifiable, not abstract
This is not guesswork. It is precision born from proximity.
WHAT “HIGH RISK” LOOKS LIKE IN PRACTICE
Within the APZone, the individuals most central to retaliatory gun violence consistently fall into recognizable categories:
The Habitual Offender
This individual is a known shooter. His actions communicate a willingness—often a commitment—to use a firearm to resolve street conflict. He is known to be a “shoot-on-sight” actor with multiple prior gun-related arrests, yet few sustained convictions. He may cycle in and out of jail, and each release is followed by renewed involvement in violent disputes. His name appears repeatedly in police reports, and both law enforcement and community members independently identify him as someone who “moves conflict” across neighborhoods – a pattern has been established. Here, the risk is predictable.
The Active Offender
This individual has a direct or proximal connection to a recent shooting. He may be mourning a friend or family member killed by gunfire or recovering from a close call shooting himself. Peer pressure to retaliate is immediate and intense. Trusted community members report that he is “outside every night,” armed, alert, and expecting more gunplay – this is not theoretical risk. The threat is imminent.
The Known Catalyst
This individual reliably escalates conflict. When he arrives, disputes intensify. Fights become shootings. He is named repeatedly—not by police, but by peers—as someone who “doesn’t walk away”- the risk here is social and behavioral, not speculative.
CVI work is not random. It is predictive. Retaliatory gun violence, while fluid, is not a mystery to those who live and labor in its midst. We know the risk. We can identify those at the center of it. And we can intervene—but only if we maintain precision and purpose.
Staying focused does not mean standing alone. CVI sits at the center of a larger ecosystem, one that must be strong, coordinated, and resourced. This ecosystem includes victim services, youth development, healing-centered providers, re-entry supports, workforce opportunities, community organizing, policy, and advocacy efforts. All these element’s matter. All of them contribute to the conditions that make nonviolence possible.
Yet none of them can replace CVI’s unique responsibility: to directly engage those most likely to shoot or be shot, to disrupt cycles of retaliation in real time, and to shepherd individuals at the center of retaliatory gun violence toward safety, stability, and transformation. In this sense, the broader violence prevention ecosystem exists to reinforce what CVI is designed to do—not to dilute or redefine it. CVI must stay anchored in its core charge.
THE OPPORTUNITY BEFORE US
CVI must become a permanent fixture in public safety: embedded in city budgets, recognized as essential infrastructure, and held to high professional standards. If the original purpose of CVI is not reclaimed in the immediate future, it risks becoming another passing program—another moment missed.
But if those of us working within the CVI ecosystem do the hard work of clearly defining and recentering its focus and holding ourselves and those who are shaping the field accountable, we can ensure that CVI fulfills its original promise: to make retaliatory gun violence rare and non-recurring by reaching the people who are most tightly bound to it. The communities we love and serve are waiting. This moment belongs to the work—are we prepared to seize this extraordinary opportunity? As a credible CVI community uniquely positioned and called to act—We must be!
(Cover Photo Source: “Community Violence Intervention Action Plan: Mapping Transformation for the Field 2024”)