On September 29, Mayor Lori Lightfoot released Our City, Our Safety, the City’s first comprehensive violence reduction plan, to guide public safety efforts through 2023. This plan is a critical tool in the City’s efforts to reduce community violence, and it is also the culmination of years of collaborative work by the City.

In 2016, Chicago experienced a dramatic spike in shootings and homicides. Since then, the City, other public agencies, nonprofits, and community members across Chicago have ramped up their efforts to sustainably reduce violence. While these efforts have contributed to important progress, violence in Chicago remains unacceptably high. Moreover, this year, gun violence has spiked precipitously, particularly in neighborhoods on the South and West Sides—compounding the disproportionate harm COVID-19 has wrought on our communities’ health and economic well-being.

In the spring of 2019, Mayor Lori Lightfoot committed to: increasing the staffing and capacity of the Mayor’s Office Public Safety Team; establishing the Office of Violence Reduction; and boosting coordination between the various people, organizations, and agencies working to reduce violence in Chicago.

To advance the City’s efforts, since June 2019, Civic Consulting Alliance has supported multiple violence reduction and prevention initiatives of the Mayor’s Office. In 2019, our work focused on developing and coordinating the City’s summer violence reduction strategy and establishing the collaborative governance structure for the Public Safety Team and Office of Violence Reduction, including the Public Safety Cabinet and Regional Coordination meetings. In 2020, we supported two projects that built upon the previous year’s foundational work:

Comprehensive Violence Reduction Strategy

From September 2019 through February 2020, Civic Consulting Alliance and our pro bono partners helped the Public Safety Team develop and launch a comprehensive violence reduction strategy. The strategy aims to measurably reduce gun violence over the next four years and guide the prioritization, coordination, and implementation of violence reduction efforts and resources. Specifically, we:

• With pro bono partner BCG, operationalized the Office’s vision including: translating its strategy to a mix of high impact prevention and intervention programs targeting neighborhoods with the highest levels of violence, estimating the programmatic funding needed to reduce violence, and updating the Office’s 2020 budget allocation to align with the new strategy;
• Project managed the development of RFPs for $7.5 million to expand community-based street outreach and integrate trauma-informed victim services for those who are at the highest risk of violence; and
• Developed an updated approach to the City’s summer 2020 violence reduction efforts, leveraging the Public Safety Cabinet (including developing a revised meeting structure in which planning began in January 2020), and Regional Coordination community planning and coordination (including developing a community needs survey and toolkit).

Violence Reduction Planning

To engage community stakeholders in building out the violence reduction strategy into a comprehensive plan, the City applied for and received a grant from the State of Illinois. The grant-funded process sought to align City, County, and State resources and priorities around a comprehensive plan to reduce violence. From February through July 2020, we provided project management support to the Mayor’s Office to engage stakeholders and develop this plan, including onboarding staff project managers, coordinating weekly meetings, and supporting the development of the report. The planning process incorporated broad input from government officials, service providers, faith leaders, philanthropic and university partners, individuals with lived experience, and advocates. It focused on four topic areas: diversion, victim services, domestic violence, and gun violence. As a result of this collaborative work, together with other ongoing City efforts, Our City, Our Safety aligns stakeholders around a strategy that approaches violence as a public health crisis, one treatable by addressing the issues at its root—such as systemic racism, disinvestment, and poverty.

While the epidemic of violence does not have any quick fixes, we are hopeful that our work with the City has created the collaborative, flexible infrastructure needed to create long-term change and to respond more effectively to short-term challenges like those brought by 2020.

“Civic Consulting Alliance has been an invaluable resource to the Mayor’s Office Public Safety Team, particularly throughout the Violence Reduction Planning process. The Civic Consulting Alliance staff gave us the capacity, expertise on collaborative decision-making, and planning tools we needed to rapidly and thoughtfully amplify our violence reduction efforts and lay the foundation for this work over the years to come.”

—Susan Lee, Former Deputy Mayor Public Safety, City of Chicago