Invisible Infrastructure
How Community Violence Interventions Build Neighborhood Safety
SIX CORNERS: Where research meets reality: deep dives combining academic insight with neighborhood-level knowledge.
On a February afternoon cold enough to make the L tracks shiver, I'm riding shotgun through Chicago’s West Side while "Dee,”1 an outreach worker for a local organization, juggles three crises via text message. His weathered SUV, which has logged more neighborhood miles than a CTA bus, idles while he coordinates with a participant about to head into a job training program. "Hold up," he says, thumbs flying across his phone screen, “also gotta make sure Marcus makes it to that medical appointment.” Before we can pull away, another message flashes: there's tension brewing between two crews in another part of the neighborhood over a fight at a party that’s continuing online. Dee sent some DMs to calm things down and muttered, “I’ll have to track this guy down later, though, cause this shit could blow over fast.”
Photo credit: Chicago CRED
Today, we call this sort of work Community Violence Intervention (CVI). It’s an old idea: trusted neighborhood experts try to disrupt violence by reaching out to those at highest risk of involvement in disputes that get settled with guns. But what I see in Dee and other outreach workers like him isn't just violence intervention—it’s the patient, persistent work of building neighborhood safety through thousands of small acts of care and connection. Each text message, each check-in, each rushed meeting is part of an invisible infrastructure that makes violence less likely not just in the here-and-now but potentially in the future as well.
Community-led safety work has Chicago roots just as tangled as the ivy on Wrigley's outfield walls. Wherever communities have been marginalized by formal institutions, they've created their own ways to ensure safety. Sociologists might call this "informal social control" or "collective efficacy." Whatever we call it, it’s thriving in places like the gym at New Life Centers in Little Village and the community room at Breakthrough in Garfield Park. In these spaces, neighbors gather to solve problems that official channels can’t or won’t address—everything from organizing block clubs, planning safe passages to school, and coordinating childcare to developing anti-violence strategies. Long before there were “violence interrupters,” there were parents meeting after church services, neighbors gathering on front porches, and families creating their own safety networks, one block at a time.
From Settlement Houses to Cure Violence
Way back in the 1880s, as the city’s ethnic and racial boundaries hardened and crime was pushed into immigrant and Black communities, this work took the form of Settlement House outreach. In 1889, Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr started Hull House in what's now the Near West Side. They believed that building neighborhood safety meant building neighborhood power. It wasn’t just about providing services, but also fighting for immigrant rights, labor protections, and public health reforms.
But there was always a tension in the settlement house approach. The workers, however well-intentioned, were outsiders looking in. By the 1930s, sociologist Clifford Shaw would try something different. Shaw’s Chicago Area Project (CAP) hired local residents who knew the streets, understood the young people, and could speak the language of the neighborhood. These "indigenous" workers’ lived experiences in the community and knowledge of the people involved in "delinquency" were seen as central to advancing a philosophy of community power and self-help. Similar projects emerged in New York City's Youth Board Project, Boston's Roxbury Project, and other cities, often working through established institutions like the YMCA to build community capacity for addressing youth violence and delinquency.
In the mid-1960s, "detached workers" and "curbstone counselors" were familiar figures on city streets, working through churches, settlement houses, and community organizations to connect young people with opportunities rather than jail cells. As Chicago's color line hardened, outreach workers shifted their foci from Italian, Irish, and Polish crews in places like Back of the Yards to addressing the deeper challenges of segregation and disinvestment facing Chicago’s Black communities. When the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations launched the War on Poverty, outreach workers became crucial links (and mediators) between disconnected youth and pathways up and out. But as the War on Poverty morphed into the War on Crime, police gang units replaced outreach workers (see, especially, Hinton 2017). It was a quick pivot from helping young people to criminalizing them. By the early 1970s, the field withered and began what researchers called "a three-decade hiatus." Surveillance, punishment, and incarceration became the standard response to gangs, the anthem of opportunity drowned out by the sirens of suppression.
Detached Workers on Chicago’s West Side mid-1960s. Photos courtesy James F. Short and Lori Hughes
I first encountered this tradition in 1998, when my then-girlfriend (and since Partner-In-Crime of 23 years) convinced me to leave a well-paid construction job for an $8-an-hour research position studying violence prevention in Chicago’s Little Village community. Chicago was reeling: gun homicides had hit record highs and the city was seen as a national symbol of gun violence. These were the days of "super gangs" and open-air drug markets, when specialized police gang units scoured the city (in 1993, for example, Chicago passed its notorious "gang loitering ordinance" that, quite literally, gave police the power and discretion to disperse or arrest people they considered “known gang members”). This was also the era when Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge systematically tortured nearly 100 Black men into false confessions.
In this “get tough” moment, the Little Village Project launched its Gang Violence Reduction Project (eventually GVRP). Designed by professor Irving Spergel, GVRP took a multi-pronged approach. Along 26th Street and the surrounding blocks, local outreach workers—many formerly gang-involved—worked alongside social workers and probation officers to connect young people to services while addressing immediate conflicts. The project wasn't perfect, nor did it achieve all of it hoped for. Violence among individual participants decreased but neighborhood-level violence remained high. Still, it kept community-based approaches alive and influenced how the Department of Justice would later think about gang violence prevention. It carved out some small space in which young people were worth saving.
CVI would experience a major resurgence and proliferation in the early 2000s, when physician Gary Slutkin began reframing the work as a public health intervention. For Slutkin and the CureViolence movement, gun violence was an actual epidemic, not some metaphor. Thus, to curb rising violence, one needed to “interrupt” cycles of transmission. Like earlier CVI attempts in Chicago, Slutkin looked to those closest to the problem to help deliver the solution. CureViolence popularized the jobs of violence interrupters, who mediated conflicts, and outreach workers who provided longer-term support. The program emphasized hiring staff with "street credibility," creating a "credible messenger" model that proved influential, spreading from Chicago's West Side to cities across the globe.
CVI Today: An Architecture of Hope
During COVID-19 and the nationwide spike in gun violence, cities scrambled for community-based solutions, finding outreach-based models like CureViolence (among a handful of others) as a useful starting point. The CVI field expanded rapidly with unprecedented support. Philadelphia's violence prevention budget reached $155 million, Indianapolis allocated $45 million in ARPA funds for CVI efforts, and California committed $75 million annually to direct service providers. Federally, the Justice Department invested $150 million in its Community Based Violence Initiative, and Congress’s Bipartisan Safer Communities Act allocated $250 million for CVI programming.
But the field wasn't just growing—it was transforming. Organizations like the Giffords Center for Violence Intervention, The HAVI, and Cities United developed comprehensive training programs and professional standards. Cities and states established offices of violence prevention, elevating CVI from grant-funded programs to essential parts of public safety solutions. Until a few weeks ago, even the White House recognized these efforts.
This rapid proliferation was initially driven by the urgent need to address spiking gun violence. What emerged was something more comprehensive. In Chicago, collaborations like Communities Partnering 4 Peace (CP4P) and organizations like Chicago CRED and the Institute for Nonviolence Chicago not only tried to stop shootings, they expanded the role of CVI beyond “interruption.” Today’s CVI organizations serve as neighborhood employers, as food and PPE and school supply distribution networks, as escorts through possibly volatile blocks, as groups that support grieving families and prevent retaliatory violence. The kind of neighborhood expertise communities have long relied on informally is being recognized—and funded.
What does this transformation look like on the ground? Since 2018, my team at CORNERS (The Center for Neighborhood Engaged Research & Science) has partnered with more than a dozen CVI organizations. Some of our studies (and others) confirm that individuals involved in CVI-based programs show significant double-digit declines in subsequent gun carrying and offending and that individual victimization also appears to decrease (though this is much harder to assess statistically). At the neighborhood level, our research found that CVI programs prevented at least 383 shootings between 2017 and 2021—that's about 7 shootings a month.
Source; Papachristos (2025). “Community Violence at a Crossroads,” Vital City.
But these violence prevention numbers capture only a fraction of the work. When we at CORNERS analyzed more than 200,000 day-to-day interactions, we clearly saw the "community" in CVI. Direct violence interruption, while crucial, ranked third behind mentoring (60% of contacts) and connecting people to jobs and services (50%). Every afternoon with workers like Dee reveal what these numbers mean: an outreach worker connecting a young person to job training in Pullman, delivering groceries to a grieving family in West Garfield Park, organizing a community meeting in North Lawndale. These aren't just violence prevention tactics—they're the building blocks of a more lasting, community-led neighborhood infrastructure. CVIs today are doing what Chicago neighborhoods have always done: creating networks of support and opportunity where formal institutions have fallen short.
CVI at a Crossroads
Built through thousands of daily acts of care and connection, this new CVI infrastructure now stands at a crossroads. Trump's return is already wreaking havoc. The White House Office for Gun Violence Prevention was shuttered on day two of the new administration, and recent appointments to the Department of Justice, the National Institute of Justice, and Attorney General's office will likely gut support for gun violence prevention in favor of traditional policing. The Safer Communities Act is vulnerable to executive action, and ARPA funds that jumpstarted many programs are already sunsetting.
The field also faces statistical challenges related to the ways we measure success in violence prevention work. While reducing shootings is obviously crucial to CVI's mission, focusing solely on the total number of shootings misses the broader neighborhood change these organizations create, as well as other key elements of public safety. For instance, when a CVI organization shows mixed results in violence reduction, we might be overlooking the vital infrastructure it’s built: the job training programs, the crisis response networks, the block clubs, the outreach staff who have become trusted neighborhood leaders. Rarely are these things measured in traditional evaluations of these programs, let alone how they contribute to both near and short term public safety (see, Hureau and Papachristos 2024).
We shouldn’t take our eyes off of violence, but we should learn to focus on more than one thing when it comes to its prevention.
What's at stake isn't just a collection of violence prevention programs. When I ride with Dee today, I see a legacy of community-led safety work: the belief in local expertise, the power of relationship-building, the understanding that safety grows from community connections. Today's CVI workers have built something bold and new: a comprehensive civilian infrastructure for public safety.
Back on the West Side, Dee's phone lights up with another message—someone else needs help, another small crisis that could grow large without attention. Like the outreach workers of the Chicago Area Project, the detached workers of the 1960s, and the violence interrupters of the early 2000s, Dee knows what Chicago's neighborhoods have been proving for generations: building lasting safety isn't just about preventing the next crisis—it's about investing in the infrastructure communities create, one block at a time.
Additional Learning
If you want to really get a feel of this type of work, give a listen to Season 5 of WBEZ’s “Motive” podcast (by Patrick Smith and Marie Mendoza) or listen to the “Streets & Beatz & Peace” by two Chicago outreach workers, Billy “Bo” Deal and Rodney “Hot Rod” Phillips;, pick up Cobe William’s new book Interrupting Violence: One Man's Journey to Heal the Streets and Redeem Himself or Chalres Baber’s Citizen Outlaw; or watch the award-winning, The Interrupters. If you want a deeper (academic) dive into the history and research on CVI-style interventions, please check out a recent Annual Review of Criminology paper, “Re-Centering the Community in Violence Intervention: Reclaiming Legacies of Street Outreach in the Provision of Public Safety” by David Hureau and myself or (plenty of citations and data tidbits in there).
“Dee” is a pseudonym as are all other names of workers and participants in this piece.