Cleveland Peacemakers Alliance Gets Five-Figure Grant to Boost Work Amid Violent Year

Carlos Williams, pictured here in 2021, was a violence interrupter at the Peacemakers Alliance for 12 years until he died from a heart attack in March of 2022. It’s latest funding could help hire Williams’ replacement, director Myesha Watkins said. Credit: Mark Oprea

Following a tense summer for crime and politics, the Cleveland Peacemakers Alliance received a funding kick from a national anti-violence organization, just months after its contract with the city was reinstated.

The Everytown Community Safety Fund, a donor-fueled anti-gun agency based in New York, doled out $40,000 to the group, it announced Monday. That grant trailed a $100,000 check given to CPA in 2021, also to sustain its non-violence operations.

This week’s funding, like the six-figure donation two years back, aims to bolster the work of violence interrupters in a time of police understaffing and high stakes, Dara Young, the associate director of community safety initiatives at Everytown, said. Because Everytown is a private organization, it can’t put strict limits, or request tight deliverables, on how CPA spends its latest check.

“It might go to staff, it may go to operational cost, it may go to keep the lights on in the office,” Young told Scene. “It may go to the needs of participants or people who are survivors of gun violence that can’t be covered from other spaces.”

Comprised of just six workers — including three outreach workers, or violence interrupters — the CPA has been increasingly hard-pressed for bankrolling help in the past few years.

Following the legacy of legendary anti-gun advocate Aquil Basheer, the Peacemakers show up at crime scenes or hospital beds or school sidewalks to console ailing victims or families, deter retaliatory actions, or just to provide an ear. And most of the work, orchestrated by just six people since 2021, has been carried out on a shoestring budget.

In February, it was announced that the Peacemakers were operating off the city’s $300,000 contract, a funding delay, Director Myesha Watkins said, that led the anti-gun workers to seek support from other benefactors, like Everytown.

Ibe Cobbs, a case manager at the Peacemakers Alliance, in 2021. Credit: Mark Oprea

Everytown’s grant coincides with the Peacemakers’ move to inch away from its long relationship with the Boys & Girls Club, which had acted as a funding intermediary since 2009, when the group was founded. A migration away from the Club, Watkins said, will allow the anti-gun violencegroup to pursue more funding opportunities, like federal help.

But the work is still tough and tiresome.

Since last summer, car thefts have doubled throughout the city.

Mayor Bibb has announced a partnership with the Bureau of ATF, and the Ohio State Highway Patrol, which resulted in 40 illegal guns confiscated in August and more than 100 felony arrests.

Bibb also suggested raising the salary of the introductory CPD cadet pay from $18/hour to $24/hour could reverse the department’s three-year hiring perils. It’s a playbook Watkins may end up imitating—either raising the violence interrupter salary (about $40,000/year for a short-term hire), or bringing on a whole new outreach worker altogether.

“It’s important that people are paid a living wage to be able to do this work,” Watkins said, “considering that most of us put our life on the line to make sure that other people live.”

“The possibilities are endless,” she added. “However, the money is not.”

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