Mayor Justin Bibb, the Cleveland Foundation and several community partners launched the Cleveland Neighborhood Safety Fund Wednesday, a first-of-its-kind grant program to fund community violence reduction organizations and programs.
“We need to make sure that there are interventions and support at every level of need. What I ask of our community in this moment is to trust that carceral and punitive interventions are not the sole solution to problems of violence,” said Positive Education Program CEO Habeebah Grimes.
“Young people who experience trauma in the course of their development have their brains changed in ways that are harmful to them as individuals but also to the community and they can become adults who continue to act out of the injury that their brains have incurred. But the brain is also a self-healing organ that will heal itself under the right circumstances.”
In July, Cleveland City Council passed legislation allocating ARPA dollars to seed the fund, which is housed at the Cleveland Foundation. The fund will award $10 million, with plans to grant $1 million annually for the first three years and five percent of the fund balance each subsequent year.
Organizers will fundraise on top of the initial $10 million to continue investing in the community as long as possible, according to Cleveland Foundation Vice President of Grantmaking and Community Impact Dale Anglin.
The fund will be awarded through Requests for Proposals (RFPs) under the guidance of a nine-person advisory committee of:
- Community appointees: mental health professional Habeebah Grimes, survivor and victim advocate Yvonne Pointer, and Hoops After Dark participant Tre’Vonte Roey
- Mayoral appointees: Directory of city planning Joyce Pan Huang, chief of youth and family success Sonya Pryor-Jones, and director of community relations and senior advisor of community and government affairs Angela Shute-Woodson
- Cleveland City Council appointees: Ward 5 councilman Richard Starr, Ward 7 councilwoman Stephanie Howse-Jones and Ward 11 councilman Danny Kelly
“The police can’t solve this problem alone,” said Bibb, echoing sentiments about law enforcement initiatives to fight violent crime in Cleveland over the summer where he repeatedly emphasized that the city can’t “police” or “arrest” the problem away.
For decades, advocates have called for alternative approaches to lowering violent crime following the initial failure of “tough on crime” policies in the 1980s, which didn’t reduce crime, created the largest incarcerated population in the world and disproportionately impacted people of color. Organizers say funding programs to address the circumstances that lead offenders to commit crime will make Cleveland a safer city.
“There’s a relationship between crisis and crime…The drivers of crime in this country are rooted in isolation, in unaddressed trauma, in chronic unemployment, in housing instability, in mental illness, in addiction. But we don’t scale those things up to be able to support people when they’re in crisis,” said Alliance for Safety and Justice chief of Federal Advocacy Shakyra Diaz. “What this city is doing is scaling safety solutions.”
The Neighborhood Safety Fund is seeking evidence-informed and community-driven 501c3 nonprofit organizations focused on violence prevention and intervention to submit RFPs.
“What folks in trauma-informed practice and healing-centered work are realizing is that it’s you who do that healing,” said Grimes. “Your feet are on the ground and you’re supporting the needs of our young people, our families and our adults everyday, driven by your culturally informed ways of knowing, driven by your training, driven by the experiences that you have.”
Subscribe to Cleveland Scene newsletters.
Follow us: Apple News | Google News | NewsBreak | Reddit | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | Or sign up for our RSS Feed
This article appears in Best of Cleveland 2023.