Nearly two years ago, the city council approved the Community Gun Violence Prevention Blueprint, a comprehensive plan to address the pervasive problem of gun violence in our community. They have allocated $6.2 million from funding they received from the America Rescue Plan Act to achieve the goals put forth in the plan. They are on round two of distributing that funding, and have agreed to distribute $2,314,005 to nine organizations who are doing gun violence prevention work in a variety of capacities. After the city reported on the first round of funding, our Editorial Board wrote about Unit 4’s choice to not spend the approximately $500,000 they were given. Most other organizations utilized the money they were allocated.
These nine organizations were included in this second year of funding, as reported in The News-Gazette:
- Carle Foundation Hospital: $200,000 for its hospital-based intervention program
- Champaign County Crime Stoppers: $100,000 for its illegal gun bounty program
- DREAAM Academy: $216,000 to continue its Hope for the Future program
- East Central Illinois Youth For Christ: $106,000 to continue providing youth development programming to Unit 4 students through the “Lunch Crew” initiative
- The Trauma and Resilience Initiative: $452,704 to “use trauma-informed, strength-based approaches and other community defined methods to provide culturally, ethnically and linguistically responsive outreach and engagement services to individuals, families and communities affected by violence”
- FirstFollowers: $686,841 for peer mentoring and their community re-entry program
- The Housing Authority of Champaign County: $150,000 for its YouthBuild program