The American Rescue Plan (ARP) Act provides state and local governments with a once-in-a-lifetime pathway toward recovery not only from the COVID-19 pandemic, but also from a history of disinvestment in Black communities and other communities of color. The ARP allocated $350 billion in flexible funding for state, local, territorial, and Tribal governments to address the harm of COVID-19, and the U.S. Department of the Treasury encourages governments to spend ARP dollars to “foster a strong, inclusive, and equitable recovery, especially uses with long-term benefits for health and economic outcomes.”

What does a strong, equitable recovery look like? It looks like a future where low-income and Black and other communities of color have the same access to safety, health, and wealth as white communities. This means spending on community resources that build safety, using health-first approaches to behavioral health crises, and limiting the harms of policing and jail incarceration. These outcomes can be achieved through investments in programs like community violence interventions (CVI). CVI strategies are proven to reduce homicides and shootings by using credible messengers to build relationships with people at the center of gun violence, and they can save cities millions of dollars. Daniela Gilbert, the new director of Vera’s Redefining Public Safety program, has spent more than a decade implementing CVI programs. In this interview she discusses how she came to this work, its challenges, and what real investment in these programs looks like.

Tell us about your experience working on community violence interventions.

I’ve spent about 10 years working on violence reduction strategies in California, Arizona, and New York. Eight of those years were in my home state of California, where in 2011 I co-founded the California Partnership for Safe Communities. I worked in 10 California cities over that period, but most intensively in Oakland and Stockton, on the implementation of group violence intervention (GVI), which is a type of violence reduction strategy that involves community members, law enforcement, and social service providers. GVI is highly collaborative. We communicate directly with people who are at the highest risk of involvement in gun violence. Our focus was on reducing shootings and homicides, improving outcomes for people at risk of violence and reducing recidivism, and building trust between communities and police. I also spent a year and a half at the New York City Police Department supporting its implementation of a GVI program.

In your work implementing CVI programs, what have been some of the challenges you encountered?

This is hard work. It depends on extraordinary levels of dedication and openness to working differently and humbly. And we need continued investment in capacity building to sustain and grow the workforce that’s required to carry out these strategies.

This work requires organized resources to identify people at highest risk of violence. It requires respectful relentlessness. We support people who have been failed by our systems over and over, and they have typically experienced a lot of trauma. One of the pastors who I worked with in New York City would always end intervention meetings by saying, “I love you, and there’s nothing you can do about it.” I think acknowledging challenges and approaching them with a solutions orientation is really important. And always centering people’s humanity.

There’s a broader challenge too. As a society, we don’t invest in communities in a way that changes the fundamental underlying circumstances that generate the need for these acute interventions. These interventions are just that—interventions. If we don’t attend to developing antiracist policy and investments and designing things equitably, then we’ll just replicate the same harm we always have. We undervalue everything related to public safety and public welfare that doesn’t have a punishment orientation. We need to remove barriers to employment. We need to provide access to high-quality health care and stable housing. The broader landscape really is a challenge because it continues to put us in a position where we need to implement these strategies.

How did you come to this work?

I am the granddaughter of refugees and survivors of state violence. My grandparents fled Nazi Germany and pogroms and eventually made it to what is now Israel and to Mexico. My grandfather survived concentration camps and many of my other relatives did not. Eventually, everyone made it to the United States. I grew up in Oakland, where I was very aware of issues of gun violence.

In college, I really dove into these issues and learned about the ways in which our criminal legal system isn’t designed to really promote safety and causes a lot of harm. I’ve always been interested in fundamental safety as a human right, and it felt obvious that I wanted to dedicate my career to implementing solutions that promote safety. I’m grateful to have been able to work on public safety transformation with amazing people ever since.