Summary
Client: Partnership for Safe and Peaceful Communities (PSPC)
Project: A strategy engagement to help the Partnership for Safe and Peaceful Communities translate its Strategic Roadmap to 2030 into concrete goals, metrics, and an annual planning process, turning a long-term vision for reducing violence in Illinois into work its partners can execute year by year.
Outcome: A set of practical tools that convert PSPC's Strategic Roadmap to 2030 into measurable goals and a repeatable annual planning process across its Action Strategies. Grounded in a facilitated goal-setting retreat, current-state metric research, and target-setting analysis, it delivers a goal-setting toolkit, a policy metric menu tied to Illinois's major public safety laws, goal-by-goal 2030 target-setting research, and an annual planning guide to carry the roadmap into FY27 and beyond.
Opportunity
The Partnership for Safe and Peaceful Communities is a coalition of more than 50 foundations and funders working together to identify and support community-led, evidence-based solutions to gun violence that the public sector can scale. Since its founding in 2016, PSPC has brought funders together to invest more than $240 million in violence reduction in Chicago, supporting community groups in more than 32 neighborhoods, concentrated on the South and West Sides. Its work is organized around a backbone team that coordinates partners and a set of Action Strategies: Community Violence Intervention (CVI), which supports people at highest risk of gun violence; Youth Interventions, focused on high-risk young people; Policy, which advances gun violence prevention laws; Reimagining Public Safety, which promotes alternatives to traditional law enforcement response; and Chicago Fund, which invests in grassroots, neighborhood-led safety efforts.
PSPC had set a north star goal for Chicago to be the safest large city by 2030, but needed an actionable roadmap with goals partners can pursue and measure. PSPC needed to turn its long-term ambitions into concrete goals, metrics, and targets, and to build a planning process that identified the key actions to drive impact year over year. Goals had to be ambitious yet measurable, metrics had to connect to real progress, and the whole effort had to be something PSPC's Action Groups could actually implement.
CCA has supported PSPC since its founding, and that deep partnership is why PSPC turned to our team to develop the roadmap actionable ahead of its FY27 annual planning.
Action
CCA helped PSPC translate its north star into goals, metrics, and a planning process.
“Getting more than 50 funders to move in the same direction takes a partner who knows our coalition. CCA has been that partner since the beginning, and this work keeps all of us pulling toward the same 2030 goals.”
Discover: CCA assembled current-state and “metric universe” research as an input to goal-setting, including a menu of metrics tied to Illinois's major public safety laws.
Design: CCA designed and facilitated PSPC's April 2026 goal-setting retreat, guiding staff through goal and metric development and an ambition-setting framework, then packaged the draft goals, rationale, and refinement steps into an Action Strategy-specific resource pack.
Deliver: CCA delivered goal-by-goal FY27 target-setting research to inform 2030 targets and an annual planning guide: a core playbook for translating the roadmap into backbone and Action Group outputs, activities, and governance routines.
Impact
By establishing measurable goals across its holistic portfolio, PSPC positions itself to track whether its collective work is moving the needle on violence, and to adjust course as it drives toward its 2030 ambitions.
PSPC came away with the tools to move from a 2030 north star to concrete annual action: a facilitation toolkit it can reuse for future goal-setting, a menu of policy metrics its Action Group leads can choose from, target-setting research for each goal, and a step-by-step guide to run FY27 annual planning. The engagement gave PSPC's backbone team and Action Groups a shared process for turning strategy into measurable work. Because the tools are designed to be reused, PSPC can keep translating its roadmap into action well beyond this engagement.
Cover photo courtesy of Nikki Way
