Evaluation of Reach and Effectiveness in City Investments in Violence Prevention

The 2020 budget of the City of Chicago invested $10.5 million dollars toward violence reduction strategies in 15 Community Areas with the highest levels of serious violence victimization and the greatest concentration of individuals with the highest risk of involvement in violence. These investments were made in four key programmatic areas: 1. Expansion of street outreach (CDPH, $7.5 million) 2. Integration of trauma-informed victim services with outreach organizations (CDPH, $1.5 million) 3. Building community capacity through trauma-informed trainings (CDPH, $500,000) 4. Support for youth and young adults at highest risk of violence (DFSS, $400,000) Some of the investments are scheduled to begin on May 1, 2020. This proposal represents an effort to develop a program that will facilitate the research and evaluation of these investments. This proposal describes a research and evaluation effort of the first two investments. The third and fourth investments address larger community capacity and youth/young adult populations and different clusters of community organizations and city-related services; the timing of these initiatives is also unclear. Many of the methods and approaches described here could be adapted to better understand the third and fourth investments but would require additional resources to cover a wider array of agencies; we are happy to revisit the impact of these latter two initiatives at a later date and build off of to the enclosed proposal. GUIDING RESEARCH AND EVALUATION OBJECTIVES On April 10, 2020 the Northwestern Neighborhood and Network Initiative (N3), The Crime Lab, representatives from the Mayor’s Office, and The Joyce Foundation convened to determine the research and evaluation objectives, distilling them into four key research and evaluation questions/aims: 1. Identifying who (i.e., which participants) the grantees are reaching and ensuring that grantees are collecting the required information to identify individual