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Community Violence Intervention in Chicago: Fall 2023 Report

October 26, 2023

Starting in 2016, with initial funding from the philanthropic sector, a handful of community violence intervention (CVI) organizations began serving individuals at high risk of shooting or being shot with a menu of services that include outreach, life coaching, trauma treatment, education and job training. Today, as public funding at the city, county and state level has increased, Chicago's CVI network has grown to more than two dozen organizations that are currently active in nearly half of Chicago's 77 communities, including all of those with the highest levels of gun violence. Collectively, they serve more than 3000 individuals, representing about 15-20 percent of the highest risk population.Comparing 2023 year-to-date to the same period of time in the peak year of 2021, shootings in most CVI communities are down. Many exceed the citywide decline.

Trends in Domestic Violence and Firearm Domestic Violence During COVID‑19 in Five US Cities

July 21, 2023

PurposeThe COVID-19 pandemic and resulting social and economic disruptions may be associated with increased risk for reported domestic violence (DV) and firearm-involved DV (FDV). This study examines trends in DV, FDV, and the proportion of DV incidents that involved firearms (FDV/DV) in five large US cities before and during the coronavirus pandemic.MethodWe examined monthly trends in DV and FDV during January 1, 2018 through December 31, 2020, which included the early part of the pandemic, using Poisson or negative binomial regressions. We used binomial regressions to assess trends in FDV/DV. We considered the onset of the pandemic to be March 2020.ResultsFindings varied across outcomes and cities. DV decreased in three cities: Kansas City (Incidence Rate Ratio (IRR), 0.88; 95% confidence interval (CI), 0.86–0.90), Los Angeles (IRR, 0.99; 95% CI, 0.99–1.00), and Nashville (IRR, 0.99; 95% CI, 0.99–1.00) relative to trends pre-pandemic. FDV increased in three cities: Chicago (IRR, 1.05; 95% CI, 1.02–1.08), Los Angeles (IRR, 1.08; 95% CI, 1.06–1.10), and Nashville (IRR, 1.03; 95% CI, 1.01–1.05) and decreased in one: Kansas City (IRR, 0.89; 95% CI, 0.87–0.90). FDV/DV increased in three cities: Chicago (Risk Ratio (RR), 1.04; 95% CI, 1.02–1.06), Los Angeles (RR, 1.09; 95% CI, 1.07–1.11), and Nashville (RR, 1.04; 95% CI, 1.02–1.06).ConclusionsWe found variation among cities in trends in reported DV, FDV, and FDV/DV during the first months of the coronavirus pandemic. Variation may be due to a number of factors, including differences in baseline DV and FDV rates; economic strain and unemployment; compliance with social distancing; firearm ownership and purchasing; the availability of DV services; delays in court processing and the early release of prisoners; and community-law enforcement relations.

It's Happening: 2022-2023 Impact Report

July 1, 2023

The 2022-2023 impact report for Together Chicago.

Serving Americans Well: Removing Bureaucracy to Help Americans Access Tax Credits

June 15, 2023

While tax credits can be incredibly effective at helping families afford basic needs and lifting working families out of poverty, the process of claiming them is difficult and confusing for many low- and middle-income families. Even among savvy tax filers, confusion is common. Additional barriers pervade the system for very low-income families, making it difficult for the people who need tax credits the most to get them. The IRS has made progress towards a simpler process, however much more needs to be done to ensure all Americans are served well by our tax filing system. While this issue has sadly become a political football, at root it is simply a matter of making our government work better for taxpayers. Simplifying eligibility for tax credits and removing extra bureaucracy in the process would immediately reduce childhood poverty and material hardship and translate to various long-term positive outcomes for families and society at large. Based on lessons learned from three years of work helping thousands of families in Illinois access their stimulus checks and Child Tax Credits, this paper translates the experiences of hard-working families into a series of policy recommendations from the Chicago team.

Technologist Retention at the Intersections

April 12, 2023

GET Cities' first-of-its kind research on the experiences of women, trans, nonbinary, and genderqueer technologists – particularly those who are also Black or Latina/e – aims to learn more about why technologists of multiple identities choose to stay in their jobs, move to better opportunities, or leave the industry all together.We encourage anyone working toward equity in tech to continue to ask these questions, demand better intersectional research, and to take the steps to get closer to parity of representation and positive and fruitful experiences for all people in tech.

“It’s Not For Us”: Understanding How Meta-Oppression Influences Black Americans’ Experiences with the Credit System

March 23, 2023

For many Black Americans the doors to critical wealth-building tools that easily open for their white counterparts are locked or obstructed because of centuries-long discriminatory policies and practices. Without these same opportunities, Black Americans are often left behind, perpetually playing against a stacked deck.Structural racism not only shapes the outcomes that people experience in all sectors of life, but it also has psychological effects on what Black Americans think is possible. This psychological stress from dealing with persistent structural racism across society is called meta-oppression, a concept developed by Dr. Jacqueline Scott.Through a study of Black Chicago residents' experiences with the credit system, we found that Black Americans internalized feelings of guilt, hopelessness, and despair, all of which hindered their willingness to further engage with the credit system. By illuminating the diverse effects of structural racism on the lives of Black Americans, we hope to reveal key opportunities for policy and practice to interrupt meta-oppression and advance racial equity across society.

How Structural Racism Shapes Black Americans’ Sense of Self: Understanding Meta-Oppression and Its Effects in the Credit System

March 23, 2023

For many Black Americans the doors to critical wealth-building tools that easily open for their white counterparts are locked or obstructed because of centuries-long discriminatory policies and practices. Without these same opportunities, Black Americans are often left behind, perpetually playing against a stacked deck.Structural racism not only shapes the outcomes that people experience in all sectors of life, but it also has psychological effects on what Black Americans think is possible. This psychological stress from dealing with persistent structural racism across society is called meta-oppression, a concept developed by Dr. Jacqueline Scott.Through a study of Black Chicago residents' experiences with the credit system, we found that Black Americans internalized feelings of guilt, hopelessness, and despair, all of which hindered their willingness to further engage with the credit system. By illuminating the diverse effects of structural racism on the lives of Black Americans, we hope to reveal key opportunities for policy and practice to interrupt meta-oppression and advance racial equity across society.

Community Engagement Strategies to Advance Justice Reform: Implementation Lessons from Buncombe County, North Carolina, Cook County, Illinois, and New Orleans

March 15, 2023

Communities across the nation are wrestling with how to identify and implement effective reforms that reduce structural inequities in the criminal legal system, promote community safety, and right-size operations of the criminal legal system to achieve more equitable outcomes and increased safety. Research suggests the most inspired and transformative solutions to such intractable problems come from collaborative partnerships between policymakers, criminal legal system leaders, and community members.However, many communities struggle with community engagement because of the strained relationships between the criminal legal system and communities that have historically been criminalized by that system or alienated by civic leaders. Fortunately, some communities have made marked progress. The MacArthur Foundation's Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC) initiative to reduce the use of jails prioritized authentic engagement with community members across its grantees to build trust, enhance problem solving, and promote mutual accountability for justice reform.This report, which is part of a series of case studies highlighting the work of the SJC initiative, examines the community engagement strategies developed and implemented by three SJC communities: Buncombe County, North Carolina; Cook County, Illinois; and New Orleans. This report documents how these sites navigated challenges and advanced tangible reform efforts, and it explores the perceived impacts of these strategies on the sites' efforts to engage community members, reduce local jail use, and implement system reforms that advance equity. We conclude with a discussion of common themes in the sites' experiences implementing those strategies and recommendations for other communities seeking to advance community engagement.Sites used a variety of community engagement strategies, such as conducting listening sessions, hiring people with lived experience of the criminal legal system to organize events, and using art to receive community feedback on public safety.Common challenges from the three participating sites include navigating long-standing mistrust between community members and government, recruitment and retention in community engagement workgroups, and shifting strategies because of COVID-19.Recommendations and lessons learned from the three sites include ensuring proper resources are available to support community engagement efforts; communicating expectations and the likely pace of progress with community members; considering the accessibility of meetings; elevating the voices of people of color directly impacted by the criminal legal system; providing benefits to community members who attend meetings; leveraging technology to engage the community; and ensuring a diverse group of people is engaged.

Case Study: Ending the HIV Epidemic in Cook County, Illinois

March 9, 2023

This resource provides an overview of the HIV epidemic in Cook County, IL − the most populous county in the state and the second most populous county in the U.S. − and the amount of HIV-related philanthropic funding received by organizations there in 2020. It complements a data partnership between Funders Concerned About AIDS (FCAA) and AIDSVu, which offers a glimpse at what the HIV epidemic looks like in the 57 jurisdictions prioritized in the Ending the HIV Epidemic in the U.S. Initiative (EHE).To learn more about the work behind these numbers, please read this feature story with AIDS Foundation Chicago.

Financial Health Pulse 2022 Chicago Report

January 31, 2023

Chicago is known as one of the most segregated cities in America, with pockets of both deep wealth and extreme vulnerability. Even compared with the country as a whole, the city's legacy of race-based discrimination and decades of disinvestment and marginalization is extreme. Today, that legacy manifests in starkly different financial opportunities and realities for its citizens, falling largely along racial and ethnic lines. In partnership with The Chicago Community Trust, we examine the factors that contribute to financial health disparities among Chicagoans and residents of surrounding Cook County.Key TakeawaysCook County, including Chicago, demonstrates both greater financial health and greater financial vulnerability than the U.S. as a whole.The disparities in financial health across race and ethnicity are dramatically larger in Cook County than in the U.S.Black and Latinx households in Cook County are far less likely than white households to have access to wealth-building assets, yet are more likely to hold most kinds of debt than white households.Black and Latinx people in Cook County are far more likely to be Financially Vulnerable than their counterparts nationwide.Racial gaps in financial health of Cook County residents can't be explained by household income alone.

READI Chicago: A Community-Researcher Partnership to Reduce Gun Violence

January 1, 2023

Gun violence is surging in the United States. In 2020, America's homicide rate rose by nearly 30%, the largest one-year increase in its history. The overwhelming majority of these were gun deaths. Communities of color bear both the brunt of gun violence — more young Black men die of gun homicide than the next nine leading causes combined — and society's main response to it: aggressive policing and long prison sentences. To address this public health crisis, cities need solutions that reduce gun violence without exacerbating the harms of the criminal legal system.One potential solution is to provide people most at risk of gun violence—those most likely to shoot or be shot—with services to help keep themselves and others safe. Recent evidence shows that cognitive-behavioral interventions can significantly reduce violence involvement. Evidence also shows that these effects may be magnified when combined with a job. Yet there is no rigorous evidence on whether the people at the highest risk can be found and engaged. Nor is there evidence on whether cognitive-behavioral programming and a job reduces the deadliest forms of violence: shootings and homicides.Here we describe the results of a large-scale randomized trial of the Rapid Employment and Development Initiative (READI) Chicago. The study fills these important gaps and shows that the combination of cognitivebehavioral programming and jobs cost-effectively lowers involvement in shootings and homicides.

Centering Youth in Community Violence Interventions as Part of a Comprehensive Approach to Countering Gun Violence

October 11, 2022

Violent crime has been rising nationally since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and many elected officials, policymakers, and media outlets have mistakenly placed the blame on young people. For far too long, youth have been an easy scapegoat for the rising violence in America. Although the real drivers of this devastating trend are complex and far-reaching, the political motivation to point to a single reason for violent crime has spawned public discourse and policy developments that have harmed generations of youth, and particularly youth of color, for a problem they did not cause.According to a recent Sentencing Project analysis, only 7 percent of the people arrested in the United States in 2019 were younger than 18, a much smaller share than in years past. This trend continued across offense categories in 2020, with the share of crime committed by youth continuing to decline. In fact, from 2017 to 2020, the total number of youth arrested fell by 50 percent, the number of youth arrested for serious crimes fell by 38 percent, and the number of youth arrested for homicides fell by 8 percent. The overall number of homicides committed by youth did rise slightly from 2019 to 2020 along with the national trend, but the share of youth arrested for homicide was only 7.5 percent in 2020 and remains lower than in the preceding years.Although the trends in youth arrests are going in the right direction, the data on youth victims of gun violence tell a different story. Gun violence was the leading cause of death among children and teenagers in 2020. Black youth are 14 times more likely and Hispanic youth are three times more likely than white youth to die as a result of gun violence. Violent crime is the consequence of historic underinvestment in communities of color. A comprehensive approach to address crime and violence should direct resources back into communities of color that have been disproportionately affected and where historic divestment has resulted in a lack of proven public health and community safety infrastructure.This issue brief highlights the importance of taking a comprehensive approach to gun violence to meet the needs of young people. It discusses how community violence intervention (CVI) programs are an important part of that approach to stop the current cycle of violence and spotlights two programs that are working to meet youth where they are.