Reducing gun violence is a critical priority for the City of Chicago, Cook County, and the State of Illinois. Significant new funding is available to all three entities via the federal American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), creating an opportunity to increase investment in community-based public health approaches to violence prevention in 2022. To ensure that this work is done efficiently and effectively, the City, County, and State sought to develop systems to facilitate intergovernmental coordination on violence prevention across funding streams.

Civic Consulting Alliance was uniquely positioned to support this work given our experience facilitating coordination across institutions, our knowledge of the Chicago region’s violence prevention ecosystem, and our expertise developing sustainable structures for collaboration. From August to October 2021, we designed and facilitated three workshops with representatives from the City, County, and State. Over the workshops, the group:

• Established common definitions for violence reduction efforts, using a public health lens;
• Reviewed data on current year funding at the program-, grantee-, and geographic-level across the city, county and state;
• Shared priorities for use of future funding (including via ARPA);
• Agreed on two priorities for coordination going forward (aligning their strategies for funding gun violence intervention efforts, and developing an approach for investing in violence prevention organizations’ capacity building); and
• Launched two working groups to focus on these priorities.

We are hopeful that this effort to better align the City, County, and State’s strategies will maximize the impact of the unprecedented public funds available through ARPA—substantially and sustainably reducing gun violence in the months and years ahead. Already, one early outcome of this collaboration was a joint ‘Readiness Summit’ the three units of government held on February 4, 2022 for nonprofits, community organizations, and vendors to learn about funding opportunities for their work, which will be followed by more specific opportunities to engage regarding violence prevention funding. The City, County, and State also recently launched a joint website www.greaterchicagotogether.org as a hub for information about their particular ARPA grant opportunities.

“Civic Consulting Alliance’s exceptional project management skills and expertise in collaborative violence prevention efforts kept us aligned and focused on our shared violence prevention goals. We are grateful for your service to the residents of Greater Chicago.”

– Lanetta Haynes Turner, Chief of Staff, Cook County