A Commitment to Gun Violence Prevention & Intervention 

The Joyce Foundation supports research, education and policy solutions to reduce gun violence and making communities safer through its Gun Violence Prevention & Justice Reform program. For more than thirty years, the foundation has helped advance the data and science supporting gun violence prevention policies and has increasingly seen the public and policymakers embrace not only firearms safety measures but investments in violence intervention work. The foundation’s original focus on Gun Violence Prevention expanded in 2017 to include a named focus area of Justice Reform and again in 2021 to include Violence Intervention.

“2025 was a tumultuous year for gun violence prevention and justice reform work. We saw the investments of the last several years in firearms safety policy, community violence intervention and justice reform pay off in significant declines in gun violence throughout the Great Lakes region,” Louisa Aviles, senior program officer, Gun Violence Prevention & Justice Reform at The Joyce Foundation, said.

The Joyce Foundation added violence intervention as a focus area in its last strategic plan, and zeroed in on three core initiatives: building the evidence base supporting violence intervention, elevating the practice of violence intervention, and supporting policies to secure public sector support for violence intervention work.

“Our violence intervention grantmaking over the past few years has aimed to help focus resources – policy, funding, governmental infrastructure, and so on – on supporting what turns out to be very small numbers of people who are at the very highest risk for being involved in community violence, both as victims and as perpetrators,” Aviles said.

Aviles shared how far the field has come in a few years. As recently as the late 2010s, there was almost no public funding for what the field now calls community violence intervention (CVI).

According to Aviles, through the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, the federal government made an unprecedented amount of federal funding available to states and localities to support innovative public safety work, and many governments chose to use that funding to support CVI work on the ground in their communities. In 2022, the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act – the first major piece of gun legislation passed in more than thirty years – made significant additional federal resources available to the states to support the implementation of firearms policy and created the first dedicated federal grant stream specifically for CVI. State and local governments have followed suit, with some allocating tens of millions of dollars annually to CVI work on the ground.

“To be clear, this definitely isn’t enough, but it’s miles better than where we were. In addition to the funding that is now supporting CVI, we count the creation of new government infrastructure to support CVI and gun violence prevention more broadly as extremely important policy achievements,” Aviles said.

Aviles shared that while the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention has been shuttered, there are now 16 such offices at the state level and dozens at the city level across the country.

“This helps ensure that government is bringing its complete power to bear on reducing firearms injuries and deaths every day,” Aviles said.

As a foundation focused on making change through advancing policy, funding advocacy and organizing is a tremendously important part of the Joyce Foundation’s overall strategy.

“We support organizations that work individually and in coalitions to ensure that the public and policymakers alike understand the lifesaving potential of a wide range of evidence-informed gun violence prevention policies,” Aviles said.

Organizations like Force Detroit, the Michigan Transformation Collective and End Gun Violence Michigan have been very effective on this front in Michigan, Aviles shared, and Community Justice and Live Free USA have been critical advocates for the CVI field at the federal level.

In Michigan, the establishment of the Office of Community Violence Intervention Services (OCVIS), plus the Governor’s Taskforce on Gun Violence Prevention, have driven the work at the state level. The Joyce Foundation was instrumental in providing technical assistance support to the OCVIS, funding strategic planning provided by the National Institute of Criminal Justice Reform. Other funding partners included CMF members the Ballmer Group, the Hudson-Webber Foundation, and the Ford Foundation. The Governor’s Office of Foundation Liaison was instrumental in brokering this public-private partnership.

Even as more public policy has been enacted and more funding invested to reduce gun violence throughout the Great Lakes region, its costs are unequally distributed across communities.