Historic funding could transform gun violence prevention efforts. But can smaller groups get hold of it?

‘It took the pandemic of Covid-19 to exacerbate the already debilitating, but forgotten, pandemic of gun violence,’ said the co-director of Movement for Life. Photograph: Amy Osborne/AFP/Getty Images

For years, local gun violence prevention programs have struggled to get long term funding. The people who look out for students on and off US school campus, sit at the bedsides of gunshot wound survivors, and embrace the families of homicide victims, are rarely paid with dedicated public money. Instead many groups survive on unpaid hours, donations and competitive one-off grants. But since 2021 a historic amount of government funding has been made available across the US that can turn the tide.

This money comes as US cities are in dire need of intervention and healing resources after a nearly two-year increase in homicides and shootings. Still, this potential windfall also comes with confusion, especially for smaller programs whose staff don’t have the bandwidth to manage tedious, competitive applications without support.