In August 2021, Mayor Lori Lightfoot announced the creation of the Community Safety Coordination Center (CSCC), a first-of-its-kind, multi-agency coordination center to advance a whole of government, community-driven approach to violence prevention and reduction for the City of Chicago.

The CSCC is a mayoral initiative that builds on lessons learned from the City’s equity-focused response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It utilizes the Racial Equity Rapid Response (RERR) Team’s innovative, collaborative model for emergency pandemic response, which coordinated resources and information across the City, practitioners, nonprofits, and community-based organizations. The CSCC brings together City departments and agencies—ranging from the Chicago Police Department to those not traditionally considered part of the safety ecosystem, such as Chicago Public Libraries, Chicago Park District, and Chicago Public Schools—alongside community organizations and leaders to advance community safety initiatives aimed at addressing the root causes of violence. Like the RERR Team, the CSCC takes a place-based approach, focusing on 15 communities prioritized in the City’s comprehensive violence reduction plan, “Our City, Our Safety,” starting with West Garfield Park, North Lawndale, Little Village, and Englewood.

Given Civic Consulting Alliance’s experience structuring effective models for collaboration—including standing up the RERR Team, and supporting violence reduction coordination at the community, City, and intergovernmental levels—the Mayor’s Office turned to us to align CSCC stakeholders on a unified vision and roadmap. From November 2021 to January 2022, we worked to:

• Develop a public health-inspired community safety framework (pictured below) that equipped CSCC stakeholders with a foundation of common language and structure for coordinating programs and services;
• Map current and planned City initiatives to the CSCC’s framework in order to identify overlap or gaps; and
• Compile a toolkit with best practices and research to support City agencies and departments in evolving their initiatives and operations to align with the CSCC’s framework—and, in turn, the City’s vision for reducing and preventing violence.

The public health-inspired community safety framework Civic Consulting Alliance developed, above, visualizes the interdependent levels of intervention needed to holistically address violence.

Today, the Mayor’s Office and CSCC stakeholders are using this framework, initiative map, and best practice toolkit to coordinate violence prevention and reduction efforts across City departments, sister agencies, and community-based organizations. This systems-level approach represents a new way for the City to work to reduce violence in Chicago, focusing on the root causes of violence, and centering community knowledge and expertise.

“Civic Consulting Alliance helped us develop a structure for approaching community safety that is driven by the needs of Chicago residents, and that will ensure more effective and efficient use of City resources. I am deeply grateful to your team for providing us the capacity and expertise we needed to accelerate this critical work.”

–  Tamara Mahal, Chief Coordination Officer, Community Safety Coordination Center