What We Learned from a Deep Dive into Violence Prevention Funding

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This week, Inside Philanthropy published a report about funding for violence prevention as part of its State of American Philanthropy project that launched last year. Each report explores contemporary giving patterns, opportunities, and trends and challenges within a major area of giving, based on grants database research, past coverage of the issues at Inside Philanthropy, original reporting and conversations with funders. (Our subscribers have access to all of these papers here.)

The violence prevention report came about in an interesting way. Last year, I worked on a State of American Philanthropy paper on criminal justice reform. This is an area of philanthropy that has, for decades, been like the David against the relentless Goliaths of the labyrinthine U.S. legal system and the sprawling complex of mass incarceration. There was so much to write about and a lot of excitement in the field. The racial justice uprisings in 2020 resulted in an unprecedented cash infusion for select nonprofits, and the longstanding strategies of constituent-led and BIPOC-led justice reform organizations were finally, to some extent, seeing support from institutional funders.

As I worked on the report, though, I grappled with which topics fell under the “criminal justice reform” umbrella. What about gun violence prevention? Surprisingly, it wasn’t mentioned in my interviews with key funders and nonprofits, and while a small handful of institutional donors (including Arnold Ventures and Joyce Foundation) have carved out gun violence prevention programs within their justice reform grantmaking portfolios, it’s not a focus of the field at large. 

A similar question arose regarding interpersonal violence and sexual violence. Neither topic has much prominence within criminal justice reform, yet certainly, these are justice reform issues. Our State of American Philanthropy paper on funding for women and girls touches upon these topics, but they aren’t prominent. Our paper on Giving for LGBTQ frequently mentions violence prevention, but it’s analyzed as a subtopic among LGBTQ funders and disconnected from broader violence prevention efforts.

We felt that these topics deserved further exploration in the form of a State of American Philanthropy paper devoted to violence prevention. Here are some of the key takeaways from that report.

Historically underfunded, currently underfunded

Perhaps the most notable attribute of this area of philanthropy is simply its lack of funding—which, not incidentally, mirrors the larger societal neglect of the problem of violence in the United States. Whether we’re talking about gender-based violence, sexual violence, child abuse or gun violence (which itself includes suicide, gang violence and domestic violence), the presence of violence is insidious, pervasive and imbedded. After spending months researching and speaking with experts in the field, I couldn’t avoid the feeling that too many have accepted violence as either just the way things are (in the vein of “boys will be boys”) or as a problem too complex to solve. It’s a tragic, self-fulfilling prophecy.

In putting together the report, our first challenge was deciding what, exactly, constitutes “violence prevention” funding, which is not itself a category in the Candid grants database. We knew we wanted to include gun violence prevention (“gun control” within the Candid database) and interpersonal violence prevention (sexual violence, domestic violence, child abuse). Beyond that, we also included crime prevention, prison alternatives, and rehabilitation of offenders.

Tracking violence prevention giving was challenging because it straddles many of the more typically acknowledged topics within philanthropy, including criminal justice reform, racial justice, housing and community development, and gender justice. But it was also relatively simple to look at the full picture of funding because there’s so little of it.

Candid data from 2014–2018, for example, shows $127 million in funding for gun violence prevention—nearly half of which came in 2018 on the heels of a mass casualty shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida. The smallness of that number is eyebrow-raising, given the far-reaching impacts of gun violence in the U.S. As Inside Philanthropy writer Philip Rojc pointed out in a 2021 article, “for all the carnage—over 43,000 gun violence deaths in the supposed lockdown year of 2020—philanthropy’s footprint in the gun violence prevention space is far from deep.” 

The good news is that there has finally been some upward movement due to a confluence of factors. These include a clarification in 2018 regarding the Dickey Amendment, which, for 20 years, stifled funding for gun violence research; political momentum; the work of community-based, youth-led, and BIPOC-led organizations; the continuous inescapability of the problem; and the emergence of funding collaboratives like the Partnership for Safe and Peaceful Communities and the Fund for a Safer Future.

A new focus on upstream prevention

One of our key interviews for the report was with Nicole Pittman, executive director of the Just Beginnings Collaborative, which defines itself as an activist fund “led by and meant for survivors developing strategies to end child sexual abuse that simultaneously addresses community and state violence.” Pittman spent years on policy work in the areas of juvenile justice, sex-offender registries and child sexual abuse, and she said that huge amounts of time and public money are spent on ex post facto efforts that don’t yield results.

“Everything we do with interpersonal violence is after the fact,” Pittman said. “We come in once the harm has happened. We have almost thrown up our hands and said, ‘it is inevitable.’ But we have to look at the conditions before harm happens—the power structures, the relationships.”

The funders I spoke with expressed a real desire to integrate upstream prevention strategies and an intersectional lens into violence prevention work moving forward. There is a collective sense of possibility, as well as uncertainty. The Movement for Black Lives and other community-based coalitions have opened many funders’ eyes to the importance of survivor-led and constituent-led programs, as well as understanding community development and youth services as an integral component of violence prevention. There is also a growing appreciation for the institutional, cultural and intergenerational factors that play a role in perpetuating violence.

Lucia Corral Peña, senior program officer for domestic and family violence at the Blue Shield of California Foundation was interviewed for the report and explained that Blue Shield is increasingly directing its grants to programs that address intergenerational violence. “When a child is a witness to domestic violence or a victim of physical or sexual violence, that is a huge risk factor for future perpetration and victimization,” Peña said. “It sounds obvious, but the field [philanthropy] wasn’t looking at that perspective, and was largely focused on victimization. But there is so much fuel propelling this cycle of abuse. So you need to be focused on also addressing trauma and healing.”

A related focus is applying a public health lens to violence prevention. This often entails allocating funds for research, which is particularly important in the areas of gun violence and interpersonal violence, where so little past research has been done to isolate factors that can be effective components of prevention strategies. 

There seems to be an emerging consensus regarding preferred strategies within violence prevention philanthropy. But the question is open: how to collectively turn this consensus of intent and strategy into a well-funded movement?

Racial justice funding collaboratives are stepping in

One of the interesting takeaways from the funding data is that the newer racial justice pooled funds have quickly become violence prevention funders. This is particularly true for collaboratives focused on funding women and girls of color, such as the Grantmakers for Girls of Color and its Black Girl Freedom Fund.

These funds, with their broad racial equity mandates, might become increasingly important sources of funding for under-resourced violence prevention nonprofits. In 2021, for example, the initial round of grants from the Black Girl Freedom Fund focused on “Black girls’ wellness and safety.” The chosen organizations—which included F.I.N.D. Design, Healing the Black Body and The Hive Community Circle—all practice forms of trauma-informed healing, healing justice and alternatives to the juvenile justice system. 

This intersection between violence prevention funding and racial justice funding, particularly for women and girls of color, makes sense. In a 2021 interview with IP’s Martha Ramirez, Aleyamma Mathew, the executive director of the Collective Future Fund (CFF), explained that funding for gender-based violence is so lacking in part because funding for women of color is likewise so lacking, and the intersections between institutionalized racism in the U.S. and the problems of violence in the U.S. are underappreciated. 

“Our mandate at CFF is not only to fund movements that are working to end gender-based violence, but it’s also to raise the visibility of the ways that violence is used as a strategic tool within larger patriarchal and white supremacist systems,” Mathew said.

A big question moving forward

A major question for violence prevention funders is whether public funding for violence prevention—whether in the form of government grants, local policy or allocation of city budgets—will begin to support, on a larger scale, some of the research initiatives and community-based prevention strategies that private funders increasingly prefer over the punitive approaches of the criminal justice system.

To date, the highest profile public effort to support community-based violence prevention strategies is the CVI collaborative, an unprecedented public-private partnership announced by the Biden administration in June 2021. The administration will work with a collaboration of 13 philanthropies and one corporation (Microsoft) to support “evidence-based community violence intervention” investments in 15 cities across the U.S. Notably, the administration’s toolbox aligns with several strategies that philanthropic funders have lately been prioritizing, including data-driven methods to target law enforcement resources to the individuals most likely to commit violent crimes, and expanding employment and recreational services for at-risk youth.

The CVI collaborative is something that violence prevention funders and nonprofits certainly have their eyes on. If successful, it could be a major source of future funding, as well as proof of concept for robust public-private partnerships in the violence prevention space.