Urban Peace Institute on This Administration’s Funding Cuts: ‘CVI Is Essential to Public Safety’

When the U.S. has a gun homicide rate 26 times higher than other high-income countries, laws alone aren’t enough to tackle the crisis. Protecting children, families, and communities takes cutting-edge gun safety laws, community care, and sustained intervention at the local, state, and national levels.

The state of California is a model for what can happen when you combine the strongest gun laws in the country with consistent support for evidence-based gun violence prevention solutions. Community violence intervention (CVI) is a proven strategy to prevent and reduce violence. The LA Peacemakers Initiative led by the Urban Peace Institute in Los Angeles is an example of how investments in on-the-ground CVI work can interrupt cycles of violence, transform communities, and create lasting safety.

But earlier this year, CVI organizations across the country were critically impacted by the Department of Justice’s termination of millions of dollars in federal grant funding. Now, decades of progress in reducing violence and rebuilding community trust are in jeopardy. 

Angela Ferrell-Zabala, executive director of Moms Demand Action and Students Demand Action, sat down with Fernando Rejón, the executive director of Urban Peace Institute. They talked about how this administration’s safety and funding rollbacks have been impacting the Los Angeles community, the tremendous reductions in homicide rates in Los Angeles, and how CVI organizations are getting creative to meet the moment and serve their communities.

Conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

Angela Ferrell-Zabala: Can you tell us a little more about the Urban Peace Institute’s mission?

Fernando Rejón: The mission of UrbanPeace Institute is to transform safety and ensure justice throughout LA and throughout the country. We have a national platform that does training and technical assistance. We work on policy. We work a lot on organizing advocacy at the local and national levels.

Most importantly, we work with folks who are on the frontlines addressing community violence at the ground level. And for us, that has really been the key motivator and driver of our work: To ensure that those who are most impacted by gun violence at the community level are leading the solutions and speaking them into existence as we build new systems.

How have the federal funding cuts impacted CVI organizations like yours?

Fernando Rejón: It was a big hit nationally. Organizations across the country, including a lot of our partners, lost vital funding that was sustaining the community-based public safety approach. Just as we are making gains and creating safety that we haven’t seen since the 1960s, we’ve seen the workforce being depleted and the funding systematically being taken away.

The availability of federal funding in local cities, particularly in Los Angeles, helped to push us light-years ahead because we had multiple streams of funding. We didn’t just rely on city funding or funding at the state level. There was federal funding, and then private funding, that we could utilize. And once those multiple funding streams became available, we saw the movement of CVI and the workforce grow throughout Los Angeles, and also throughout the country.

Stripping communities of these dollars really hinders our ability to expand the understanding of what public safety is and to minimize the impact of gun violence at the local level. 

It is a tough political climate right now for so many people in this country. How are you getting creative with your strategies in Los Angeles to meet the moment?

Fernando Rejón: One thing we repeat over and over is that CVI is essential to public safety. 

At the federal level, as is well-documented, this federal administration is not interested in public safety, democracy, or ensuring that people have rights to due process. There is a staunch shift in the rhetoric, in the overt racism that is happening at the community level, where people are being disappeared and people are being profiled. It’s really hitting our communities hard.

To have a base level of public safety, there needs to be some type of trust. And when that public trust is broken, particularly when you have federal agents doing extralegal things at the community level, it really hurts the ability to have stability in a community. [Before this], people [understood] that, okay, if law enforcement is there, they’re not just going to arrest us, they’re not just going to criminalize us, they’re actually going to support us. In this case, it makes it harder on the local law enforcement when you have the federal government coming in, doing whatever they want to do. It makes it harder on the local law enforcement agencies that are saying, “Okay, now we have to deal with the aftermath of all this distrust and disruption that’s been built.’

For us, we’ve had to train intervention workers on know your rights as well as legal self-defense so that they can protect themselves: How to be legal observers, when to step in, when not to step in, if they do step in, what they can or can’t legally do. That training is just to protect themselves as a vulnerable population that is out there in the community. Many of our workers were formerly incarcerated or have records. But now that they’re out there as peacemakers, they have to know what the guidelines are, what the parameters are.

What you’re highlighting, which is important, is that this is an ecosystem. When we talk about at-risk communities, we also talk about where they have been divested from. We know that Black and brown communities in Los Angeles are the ones that are most impacted by gun violence. We also know that these communities are all too often denied the support and resources that they need. What do you think organizations could do to reach these communities better and also close these gaps?

Fernando Rejón: One of the big things, and we’ve been talking about this with our national CVI work, is capacity building and ensuring that organizations can go after different types of funding.

We advocate with the Los Angeles Violence Intervention Coalition, which is a coalition of 20 Black- and brown-led organizations. Working with them, we’ve advocated for millions of dollars to come to Los Angeles. The challenge was to ensure that all of the organizations, no matter their size, had access to those funds. So we set up the LA Peacemakers Initiative, which is braided funding: a federal earmark, as well as private funding from a large foundation. And we are administering those dollars specifically to the 20 organizations that are part of the Coalition to ensure that we can expand the workforce and ensure better safety outcomes. 

We are also building capacity for these organizations. This might be their first time administering federal funding, but as they get used to it, they can begin developing their own infrastructure to go after dollars and not just depend on one single funder, which, a lot of times, doesn’t get sustained for the long term. When organizations depend on one source of funding and it disappears, then the organization using that funding also disappears. When folks are out of work, you reduce the impact and the capacity of the field of CVI to create safety. 

And I think the key is really going to be unity across our field and across cities. In this moment, under this administration, I think we have to stand together and resist, peacefully of course, that’s what we do. We have to resist peacefully at all levels, but we also have to fight for democracy. And I think the work that we are doing every day, whether it’s gun safety, dealing with gun violence, community violence intervention, immigrant rights, working with communities of color most impacted, I think that type of work right now is where we need to really invest and build unity and build common lines of support. That is what is going to help us get through the next couple of years as we continue to fight for democracy and change the dynamics of the administration. 

I couldn’t agree more. We’re talking a lot about what’s at stake, what you’ve seen coming out of this administration, and some of the impact on communities. I also want to make sure we have time to talk about success stories, because there’s incredible work that you’re doing and have been doing. Can you share some of your biggest wins from your time with this organization?

Fernando Rejón: We’ve really proven what community-based safety looks like and what’s possible. That’s been really tremendous as proof of concept when you have the city investing $23 million to $43 million consistently each year in the most impacted areas of the city. We’ve seen a workforce be built up, led by people who come from those communities, who have those backgrounds, and who are dedicated to saving the next generation.

From 2010 to 2020, we were below 300 homicides per year in the city of Los Angeles. That was phenomenal for us because, at its height, it was over 1,000 homicides per year in 1992. Violence in LA, and across the country, jumped back up in 2020. But in 2024, we were back below 300 homicides. This year—knock on wood—we’re on track to be below that as well. 

What we’re seeing is that the safety gains we’ve created infrastructure around are actually paying dividends. We are seeing the rates of violence drop because there have been these multiple streams of investment—it wasn’t just city investment, it was also county, federal, and private—coming in and building up a workforce that has better safety outcomes than just law enforcement alone.

We found that in LA, when the Los Angeles Police Department by itself responds to a gang-related homicide, the likelihood of retaliation is 24 percent. Put another way, there’s a 24 percent chance that someone else is going to be killed because of that shooting. CVI workers have a parallel infrastructure to law enforcement: We don’t cross the yellow tape, we have strict firewalls. But when our gang intervention workers and law enforcement in our separate lanes respond, the likelihood of another homicide drops to below 1 percent.

Continuing to work in parallel with law enforcement really helps transform communities’ understanding of what safety is. Because what safety is going to look like in Beverly Hills is going to be different than what safety is going to look like in South-Central LA. It’s just different. We need a different type of safety that requires more investment. It also requires the building of community leadership, which is a longer-term vision. We’re not running for office: We’re building long-term infrastructure that’s going to really reshape what safety looks like nationally in this country.

One last question: What’s one thing that you think national gun violence organizations can do this year in particular to stand in deeper solidarity and alignment with your organization and your community?

Fernando Rejón: Power-sharing is really the important thing. The gun safety movement has had significant investment over the years, built infrastructure, and has resources. 

How do you share power and platform to really leverage the power of CVI? You can leverage our stories, our experiences, and our know-how to really address gun violence at the ground level. We need to have access and share power to get the narrative out there about the type of safety our communities want to see. It’s not the type of safety outsiders want to see. It’s the type of safety that people who are living in those conditions want to see. And I think that’s the difference.

What I am encouraged by over the years is the willingness to actually engage and start to learn from each other. And I think that’s the important piece. For us, we want to harness each other’s power, experience, and knowledge to reshape how this country looks at guns and addresses gun violence, and who is the most impacted in our communities. 

Thank you so much, Fernando, Urban Peace Institute, and all the other organizations on the ground right now in Los Angeles, across California, and around the country. Now more than ever, it is imperative that we ensure CVI work collectively continues to be resourced. That’s why the Everytown Community Safety Fund, a program of the Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund, is committed to supporting our network of community violence intervention organizations.