For your role / Office & systems leaders
Set up or run a violence prevention or neighborhood safety office. Learn how to connect agencies, give community partners a real role, and get funding and services moving.
Model design and implementation
Community violence intervention (CVI), Group Violence Intervention (GVI), and hospital-based violence intervention programs (HVIPs) serve different needs. Before choosing one, check whom it reaches, what staff and partners it needs, who can authorize the work, and how you will know it is being delivered.
From the Soren Tsui episode: the structure supporting frontline community violence intervention.
View full-size graphic (opens in a new tab)This graphic maps the program structure behind frontline CVI. It describes a strong CVI program, not an entire jurisdiction’s public safety system.
Systems design · Soren Tsui
Start with the local shooting pattern, choose an approach that fits it, and identify the staff, agreements, funding, and support needed to deliver it.
Watch and explore companionsGroup Violence Intervention · Sasha Cotton
Consider how GVI combines direct communication, support, community moral authority, and focused consequences—and what implementing agencies must coordinate.
Watch on YouTubeFrom the CVI practice toolkit / office leadership
After a difficult encounter, use supervision to examine the conditions your office or program can change. Give an owner and a date to any gap you identify.
Staff support / office practice
Protect judgment, safety, and continuity after a difficult encounter.
Leadership check: Personal coping cannot replace staffing, pay, safe protocols, and responsive supervision.
Adapted from Jonathan McMillan’s How To Be An InCredible Messenger: Community Violence Intervention Toolkit (2025).
Illustrative situation · ICM application
An outreach provider is selected, but its contract and first payment are delayed. Workers have not been hired and residents still cannot reach the promised service. The director needs a timeline from procurement, finance, and the provider, with one person able to clear each delay. A council can identify the gap; the agency that holds the contract must act on it.
The useful output is a dated delivery plan showing the contract, payment, hiring, training, and first service. Review actual start dates and residents’ access at the next meeting. Use the implementation chain to trace the dependencies, then check the evidence and measures that fit the local decision.
Start here
Turn a title and a budget into a working structure with clear decisions, reliable partners, and public accountability.
Put the office’s authority, scope, budget, and relationship to the mayor, agencies, and community partners in writing. Name the decisions it owns and the ones it must influence.
See how prevention, intervention, crisis response, recovery, and the conditions behind harm connect. A strong community violence intervention (CVI) program is one part of this picture.
Meet regularly to review numbers, worker experience, and resident feedback. Leave with a decision, a responsible person, and a deadline. Tell residents what changed and why.
Set up and run the office
This is an ICM starting sequence. Adapt it to the legal mandate, local conditions, and the authority each partner actually holds.
A new office can coordinate the system only when its responsibilities and decision rights are real.
Fund the field
Follow the grant’s rules, then make the process usable: clear instructions, realistic payment dates, and reporting that helps you check the work without overwhelming small organizations.
Learn from the work
These ICM resources connect a practical lesson to the framework or conversation it came from. Guest perspectives are identified as guest perspectives.
Framework
Connect prevention, intervention, response, recovery, authority, and accountability.
Read this resourceFramework
Build community knowledge, resources, and decision rights into the operating plan.
Read this resourceICM guide
Trace every dependency between an approved strategy and services reaching people.
Read this resourceICM guide
Give agencies and residents a structure for making and carrying out shared decisions.
Read this resourceFrom Soren Tsui
Compare the model’s operating requirements with the local pattern and capacity.
Read this resourceGo to the source
Read the original guidance and check funding notices directly. Eligibility, deadlines, allowable costs, and reporting rules come from each notice and can change.
Program example · prior notice
The FY25 community violence intervention funding round is closed. Review its requirements as an example, then check current notices for any new round.
Open sourceCurrent notices
Open the current federal notices and read each notice for eligibility, dates, and rules.
Open sourceCurrent notices
Review BJA opportunities, including relevant public-safety and intervention programs when offered.
Open sourceCurrent notices
Check youth-focused opportunities and their specific eligibility rules.
Open sourceFederal search
Search across federal agencies; confirm the complete notice before planning an application.
Open sourcePut it to work
Work with Jonathan to clarify your office’s job, connect partners, fix a grant process, or build regular reviews that lead to action.