Gun violence appears to be decreasing in Chicago, thanks in large part to community violence-intervention (CVI) programs. But as President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice slashes funding for community groups, the trajectory of this progress is uncertain.
According to the Trace, the city saw a 50-percent drop in fatal shootings over Fourth of July weekend compared to 2024, from 22 deaths to 11. Overall, 2025 is on track for a similar reduction.
But the canceled federal grants to CVI, along with those to community groups focused on other issues like substance use disorder, totaled around $811 million. According to Nonprofit Quarterly, one such organization, the Community-Based Public Safety Collective, received $2 million in grants to work with 95 different institutions, including community groups and local governments, to implement community violence intervention initiatives. The funding cuts have forced it to suspend work that was already underway.
Teny Gross, executive director at the Institute for Nonviolence Chicago, said these relationships take a long time to build and can’t easily be replaced. The Institute for Nonviolence Chicago is not directly impacted by the DOJ grant cuts, but Gross said that many smaller organizations are in a different position. In some cases, local governments have been relying entirely on those grants to continue CVI work.
Gross said that a decade of work went into establishing relationships with key stakeholders.
“It’s work that is detailed, boring, behind the scenes; thousands of hours of relationship [building],” Gross told Filter. “These young people that are involved in conflict, now some of them are driving trucks, being trained as peace keepers, or getting therapy.”
The Institute for Nonviolence Chicago helps connect people involved in street violence to housing, job training, record expungement and educational opportunities like GED testing. Gross said it focuses primarily on three neighborhoods—Austin, West Garfield and Back of the Yards—and is negotiating non-aggression agreements with most of the 52 local rival groups. Outreach workers with lived experience respond to shootings 24 hours a day.
“Society has given up on them, and they’re used to a different culture of survival,” Gross said of impacted people. “When you have someone who knows your uncle, maybe he was incarcerated with you, say ‘Hey, I got away, look, I’m doing better,’ … it really matters.”
Gross said that a decade of work went into establishing relationships with key stakeholders, from elected officials to local businessowners and Chicago’s law enforcement leadership—a relationship that Gross said has made this CVI easier than in other cities he’s worked in previously.
“They understand we cannot share [outreach worker] information with them,” he said, “[yet] they share with us 24/7 information when there is a shooting, and they let us do our own mediation.”
The funding cuts threaten some incremental progress made under the previous administration. In 2022, in the wake of high-profile mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas, Congress reached a rare bipartisan agreement on gun reform. The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, signed into law by former president Joe Biden, added $250 million for CVI work. Biden also launched the first-ever White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, which coordinated for those programs. That office was shut down by Trump just hours after his inauguration.
