A bill set to be discussed by Pittsburgh City Council on Wednesday aims to overhaul the management of a violence prevention trust fund, as critics are calling for a closer examination of the sometimes-controversial initiative.
“Everyone should feel more comfortable on how the fund functions,” said Council President Dan Lavelle, who sponsored the bill.
The Stop the Violence Fund was created in 2020 by City Council to address violence from a public health perspective. It receives a share of city funds pegged to spending on the Bureau of Police up to $10 million, the amount set for the upcoming budget year.
The fund gives money to internal departments, like the city’s Office of Community Health and Safety, and to community organizations that address violence, inequality and poverty in city neighborhoods. The goal is to support initiatives that help prevent evictions, engage youths in after-school activities, provide food in underserved areas, and more.
But skeptics say the program’s oversight and reporting are too nebulous, and that it is not clear whether all of the organizations that receive funding are having a tangible impact.
“I think everybody would want to stop violence. It's how we do it and what dollars we're using to do it, and who's overseeing it and who's making sure that we're delivering results,” Councilor Theresa Kail-Smith said. “I don't want a slush fund. I want a program that's actually going to yield results for young people.”
Kail-Smith said that while some programs, like the city’s REACH violence prevention initiative, have had positive effects, she’s been told others aren’t as effective, while still others don’t receive enough money to have an impact. (In 2022, for instance, organizations individually could receive anywhere from $10,000 to $105,250 in funds.) She’s kept a wary eye on the program for years, and sponsored a 2023 bill to require that officials document fund expenditures.
Under Mayor Ed Gainey, the fund has often awarded small-dollar sums to grassroots groups, based on a premise that such groups have closer connections with the communities they are meant to serve. But those groups don’t always have much in the way of administrative overhead to track funding, and the city’s own approach has been informal, overseen by an unofficial steering committee of city councilors and representatives from the mayor’s office and public safety department.
Khari Mosley, who cosponsored the bill with Lavelle, said that with the fund reaching its $10 million ceiling, it’s time to tighten up standards.
“If we're gonna expand the number of expenditures we make and have larger expenditures out into the community,” Mosley said, “we want to have more accountability, more measurements, and a stronger structure.”
‘We need to have a thorough discussion’
Lavelle and Mosley’s legislation would shore up the reporting and governance structure that handles the fund and make it more official. It would turn the fund’s unofficial steering committee into a formal body with representation from council, the mayor’s office, and public safety. It also requires a data-driven approach to tracking causes and outcomes, though it doesn’t specify that approach, leaving it to the Office of Community Services and Violence Prevention to devise a method.
“This is really taking sort of informally how we've been functioning over the years and actually formalizing it into legislation,” Lavelle said.
The bill also specifies how much funding should go to various types of organizations. Of the half of the fund’s money that goes to community organizations, for instance, 25% will go to trauma-informed community services, 45% will go to violence prevention and intervention programs and 30% to programs addressing poverty and driving economic growth.
Felicity Williams, Mayor Ed Gainey’s deputy chief of staff, said the goal is to move from a grant model towards a contract model, much like other city departments contract with independent organizations for services.
“We leverage the local expertise of those organizations to deliver services to the city of Pittsburgh every day. That's exactly what's happening with the community-based funding for the Stop the Violence Trust Fund,” she said. “That's the direction we are heading with the future of this work.”
Kail-Smith says she sees the need for a broader discussion about the overall efficiency of the Stop The Violence fund.
“I think we need to have a thorough discussion about what exactly the bill will change, what exactly needs to happen and what is the right dollar amount and the right avenue to fund this program,” she said. She noted that the city must be especially careful with its finances as it faces fiscal headwinds in the next few years.
Neither Kail Smith nor fellow Councilor Anthony Coghill, another fund critic, named programs they saw as problematic, but both said they wanted to audit the fund’s spending. Coghill said there might be better ways to spend the money elsewhere.
“I just would like to evaluate the whole thing, and honestly direct and steer, whether some of that money or a lot of that money, towards things that are really desperately needed,” Coghill said. As potential recipients of that funding, he pointed to the city’s depreciated vehicle fleet and its mounted police unit, whose funding was phased out in the city’s most recent budget.
Gainey staffers argue the money does have an impact. Williams pointed to the oft-cited 41% drop in homicides and 38% drop in non-fatal shootings in the city since 2022, when the Community Investment Grant portion of the program launched.
The decline in homicides has been a national phenomenon (as was a COVID-era spike in violence when Gainey first took office). But Lavelle believes community-level violence prevention must stay part of the city’s priorities – even as other needs are pressing.
“It cannot simply be ‘buy new police cars to show up to the scene after a tragedy has occurred,’ but we also have to invest in all the opportunities to stop that tragedy from ever existing,” he said. “Both have to be true. It's not an either-or.”
Representatives from organizations that have received grants say it can be difficult to demonstrate the impact of the funding to those outside the communities being affected. But they maintain it is real.
“You have to see the life-changing events. You have to hear that person's testimony,” said Donta Green, executive director of the Trade Institute of Pittsburgh, a workforce development organization that received Stop the Violence funds. “It's challenging to put numbers to it and put metrics to it. But it's happening.”
“It's too soon to fully evaluate something of this magnitude,” agreed Walter Lewis, president and CEO of the Homewood Children's Village. The group received Stop the Violence money for its work with children and families in Homewood.
“When you're trying to take down a disease, you can't do one thing and say, ‘Oh, it didn't work, and so I guess we have to scrap the whole process,’” Lewis said. “You have to take a much more scientific approach to it, and I think that's what we're trying to do here.”
