Four West Side neighborhoods will see an increase in violence prevention programs targeting people most at risk of gun violence as a group of business leaders nears an ambitious goal of raising $100 million in private funding.
The expansion was announced Monday by leaders of the nonprofit, which employs workers, mostly from the streets, to mediate neighborhood disputes and enroll at-risk people in programs including therapy, education and job training.
The neighborhoods covered are Austin, Garfield Park, Humboldt Park and Little Village, and roughly one in five shootings in the city occur in one of these neighborhoods, according to city crime statistics.
“This strategy is not perfect,” Jalen Arthur, director of strategic initiatives at Chicago CRED, told a room of anti-violence activists at the Chicago Institute for Nonviolence's Austin headquarters.
“There are still areas to be strengthened,” he said, “but the promising outcomes are a congratulations from the highest, and we are grateful for the opportunity to empower our men and women on the frontline to play a key role in the peacebuilding process.”
Jalen Arthur, director of strategic initiatives for Chicago CRED, spoke to anti-violence activists, business and government leaders on Monday.
Over the past five years, violence prevention programs have spread to every neighborhood in the city thanks to a massive expansion of funding from charities and government grants for non-police approaches to counter the surge in violence that began during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Last year, business leaders pledged to raise $100 million to fund a five-year plan to expand the program on a scale that would lead to a significant reduction in gun violence.
The effort, called “Scaling Up Community Violence Intervention for a Safer Chicago,” or SC2, has nearly reached its goal, according to Bob Boyk, vice president of public safety for the Chicago Commercial Club Civic Committee.
SC2 is looking for research partners to provide data that can track whether the programs are effective and potentially prompt increased public spending, said Boyk, who is leading the Chicago Police Department's reform efforts under a federal consent decree through 2022.
“If the data shows progress, I think that's a possibility,” he said. “Once the expansion period is over and everything seems to be going in the right direction, we'll see the public sector take on more funding.”
Increasing funding for those programs was a major initiative by former Mayor Lori Lightfoot's administration, which came under fire for a surge in crime during the pandemic.
No one from Mayor Brandon Johnson's administration or the Chicago Police Department spoke at Monday's event.
But West Side Councilmen Emma Mitts (37th Ward) and Chris Taliaferro (29th Ward) spoke, with Mitts thanking violence prevention workers who responded to two mass shootings that happened within an hour of each other in Humboldt Park and Inglewood early Monday morning.
“I know you guys have been out all night,” Mitts told the crowd.
Taliaferro, chairman of the City Council's Public Safety Committee, hasn't yet seen Johnson's budget for next fiscal year, but warned that increased spending on violence prevention programs will need to last longer than federal funding that is nearly set to expire by 2026.
“Everything is expensive, especially if it's worth it,” Taliaferro said. “We certainly couldn't do without these organizations and what they do.”
Cathy Carrick, director of the North Lawndale Collaborative, a coalition of groups that has been coordinating anti-violence efforts in the area since 2022, said research shows that residents in the four neighborhoods are driving gun violence only in a small percentage of the population.
Chicago CRED, Metropolitan Peace Initiative, READI Chicago, and North Lawndale Employment Network have worked closely together to more than triple the number of program participants considered most at risk for gun violence.
But these programs only reach about 20 percent of people who need them, Click said.
“Any progress we've made in our community has had a huge impact,” she said. “Is 20 percent something to celebrate? I think we've saved lives, but there's still so much more to do and so many more lives to save.”
