Chicago Office of the Mayor – Violence Reduction
In 2016, Chicago experienced a dramatic spike in shootings and homicides. Since then, the City, other public agencies, nonprofits, and community members across Chicago have ramped up their efforts to sustainably reduce violence. While these efforts have contributed to important progress, violence in Chicago remains unacceptably high. Moreover, in 2020, gun violence has again gone up precipitously, particularly in neighborhoods on the South and West Sides—compounding the disproportionate harm COVID-19 has wrought on these communities. Gun violence is an issue of paramount importance to our collective well-being and to our region’s prosperity—it is a crisis that affects us all, and that we must work together to solve.
To strengthen Chicago’s focus on reducing gun violence, in the spring of 2019, newly-elected Mayor Lori Lightfoot committed to building out the Mayor’s Office Public Safety Team; establishing the Office of Violence Reduction; and boosting coordination between the people, organizations, and agencies working across the city to reduce community violence. To advance the City’s efforts, Civic Consulting Alliance supported multiple violence reduction and prevention initiatives of the Mayor’s Office between June 2019 and July 2020.
“The Civic Consulting Alliance team gave us the capacity, expertise on collaborative decision-making, and planning tools we needed to amplify our violence reduction efforts and lay the foundation for this work over the years to come.”
Summer 2019 Violence Prevention
With the Mayor taking office in late May 2019, the Public Safety Team had very little time to ramp up before the start of the summer—typically the most violent time of the year, when about 50% of annual homicides and 40% of non-fatal shootings occur. Accordingly, the Mayor’s Office called upon Chicago CRED, UChicago Crime Lab, and Civic Consulting Alliance to collaborate with the City to develop and implement gun violence reduction initiatives.
From June through October 2019, Civic Consulting Alliance and our pro bono partners supported four initiatives that laid the groundwork for the new administration’s approach to gun violence (summer Public Safety Cabinet meetings, Regional Coordination meetings with stakeholders from across the South and West Sides, backbone operational support, and 2020 budget development), and established a governance structure that connects people from across the city and its violence prevention infrastructure with the Mayor’s Office.
Comprehensive Violence Reduction Strategy
Building upon the foundational work above, between September 2019 and February 2020, Civic Consulting Alliance and our pro bono partners helped the Mayor’s Office develop and launch a comprehensive violence reduction strategy. The strategy aims to measurably reduce gun violence over the next four years, and to guide the prioritization, coordination, and implementation of violence reduction efforts and resources.
Specifically, Civic Consulting Alliance:
With pro bono partner BCG, operationalized the Office’s vision including: translating its strategy to high-impact prevention and intervention programs serving neighborhoods with the highest levels of violence, estimating the programmatic funding needed to reduce violence, and updating the Office’s 2020 budget allocation to align with the new strategy;
Managed the development of RFPs for $7.5 million to expand community-based street outreach and integrate trauma-informed victim services for those who are at the highest risk of violence; and
Developed an updated approach to the City’s summer 2020 violence reduction efforts, leveraging the Safety Cabinet (including developing a revised meeting structure in which planning began in January 2020), and Regional Coordination community planning and coordination (including developing a community needs survey and toolkit).
Violence Reduction Planning
In early 2020, the City received a grant from the State of Illinois to engage community stakeholders in building out their violence reduction strategy into a comprehensive plan that would align City, County, and State resources and priorities. From February through July 2020, Civic Consulting Alliance provided coordinating and management support to the Mayor’s Office to engage stakeholders and develop this plan, including onboarding staff project managers, coordinating weekly meetings, and supporting the compilation of the report.
The planning process incorporated broad input from government officials, service providers, faith leaders, philanthropic and university partners, individuals with lived experience with gun violence, and advocates. As a result of this collaborative work, together with other ongoing City efforts, the plan—"Our City, Our Safety”—aligns stakeholders around a strategy that approaches violence as a public health crisis, one treatable by addressing the issues at its root—such as systemic racism, disinvestment, and poverty.
While the epidemic of violence does not have any quick fixes, we are hopeful that our work with the City has created the collaborative, flexible infrastructure needed to create long-term change and to respond to acute challenges like those brought by 2020. Moreover, we are proud to have contributed to an effort that is expanding investments in and coordination with community-based violence reduction infrastructure, which has proven even more critical as our city continues to grapple with the effects of COVID-19 on public health, economic well-being, and violence levels.
OUTPUTS
Increased capacity—supported four violence reduction initiatives and increased the Mayor’s Office’s Public Safety Team’s capacity by eight staff over summer 2019
Governance structure—developed for public safety cabinet coordination to ensure the City's violence reduction efforts are collaborative and shaped by community organizations' input
Two RFPs—developed to distribute City funding to expand community-based street outreach and integrate trauma-informed victim services for those who are at the highest risk of violence
Framework—for a comprehensive violence reduction strategy to guide the prioritization, coordination, and implementation of violence reduction efforts and resources
Design and implementation—of a process that convened over 100 stakeholders across various sectors to build out recommendations for the City's comprehensive violence reduction plan
OUTCOMES
Mayor’s Office developed and quickly launched a summer violence reduction strategy in 2019, and laid the groundwork for its approach to gun violence
Governance structure connecting people on-the-ground—from across the city and its violence reduction infrastructure—with the City and the Mayor in place
$7.5 million in City funding awarded to 17 community-based street outreach and victim services organizations in communities at highest risk of violence
Regional coordination meetings between Mayor’s Office and other violence reduction stakeholders expanded to cover three of the five Chicago Police Department Areas, ensuring improved collaboration in these key communities
City equipped for the first time with a long-term, collaboratively developed violence reduction plan to guide the work needed to sustainably reduce violence
