Announcing our newest Transformation Grant
$300,000 for reducing gun violence in our community
By Sue Hafkemeyer / President & CEO
We’re greeting 2023 with a very exciting announcement. Our newest Transformation Grant will provide $300,000 over the next three years to help build out an innovative strategy for reducing gun violence in the Quad Cities.
The initiative is known as Group Violence Intervention (or GVI), and it’s a uniquely collaborative approach to this complex challenge. Working together, Family Resources, the Davenport Police Department, and community volunteers build relationships with the small number of people in our community who are at the highest risk of becoming victims of violent crime or offenders themselves—often one and then the other as the cycle of violence goes unchecked.
With this grant, Family Resources and the initiative’s community volunteers will be able to provide a fuller depth of support and services to help these community members break those cycles. The grant will also fund research and evaluation by St. Ambrose University, laying the groundwork for future enhancement and expansion to reach even more people. I encourage you to read the full story so you can learn more about GVI and what the Transformation Grant, which is made possible by donors to the Quad Cities Community Impact Fund, will mean for this critically important effort.
Like many in the Quad Cities, we at the Community Foundation read about the tragic deaths of members of our community in recent years with sorrow and dismay. Our staff had the privilege of joining early conversations about how to address the challenge of gun violence locally, and when GVI was identified as a potential solution, we began investing time in understanding its nuances so we could bring our resources to bear for the most good.
What we’ve learned is that a highly focused and individualized strategy like GVI can be a powerful tool for greater racial equity in our region, since violence disproportionately impacts young Black men and boys, who not only face many systemic disadvantages but are also underserved by traditional social services. We’ve learned that while the strategy is being piloted in Davenport right now, the need and opportunity to expand it to other areas of the Quad Cities is clear. And we’ve learned that the more our community—our nonprofits, our funders, our residents themselves—can collectively take ownership of this solution, the less likely we are to read those devastating headlines in the future.
For those reasons and more, we believe this initiative has the potential to transform our community. Embodying values of equity and access, leadership and innovation, partnership and collaboration, it represents so much of what we stand for as a community foundation. I hope you’ll join us in celebrating this Transformation Grant as we embark on a new year together.