This story was produced in partnership with the Illinois Answers Project as part of their series Making it in Chicago: Detours and Dead Ends on the Path to Opportunity.
BELMONT CRAGIN — On a recent Tuesday, dozens of people lined the block waiting their turn at a food pantry that shares a building with the Institute for Nonviolence Chicago (INVC). The long line was a stark reminder of the connections between poverty and violence cited by researchers and advocates, and a major part of why INVC and similar organizations include workforce development in their programming.
Inside INVC that afternoon, a dozen young Black men tumbled out of an elevator on their way home from a jobs-training program, joking with one another and offering polite greetings to visitors. The program is unique in that it combines workforce development with behavioral-health training to address trauma, which many of these young men have experienced firsthand due to the high rates of violence in their West Side neighborhood. Since 2016, nearly 3,500 people have gone through the paid twelve-week program, where they learn relationship building and social skills along with resume writing and interviewing.
Some program participants have even been hired by INVC as community violence intervention (CVI) workers. One of the nonprofit’s staffers was in its orbit for years even as he remained in the streets, where he narrowly survived after being shot. Now, he’s among a legion of CVI workers who come to the streets, alleys, and hospital rooms night after night to talk people down from committing violent acts.
Mayor Brandon Johnson is taking a cue from organizations like INVC. The mayor’s ambitious plan to tackle gun violence emphasizes “root causes” such as poverty, institutional divestment, and unemployment in neighborhoods hardest hit by shootings. Last year, his administration began addressing them with a combination of place-based outreach efforts, jobs programs, and violence interruption techniques long used by nonprofits. Along with these approaches, Johnson and Gov. JB Pritzker have pledged millions to more direct violence-prevention and victim-services programs.
While Johnson has attributed recent declines in shootings to these efforts, the true impact of anti-violence work is hard to measure. Gun violence in Chicago ebbs and flows as a result of myriad factors, many of which are impossible to quantify — or control, such as predictable upticks that come with warmer weather each summer. In the hardest-hit communities such as Garfield Park, shootings remain above-average even when violence declines citywide. The approaches of Johnson’s administration and West Side organizers aim to permanently reduce violence by tackling both its immediate causes and addressing the entrenched poverty they say is the only way to create a sustainable impact.
The West Side has grappled with gangs, drugs and violence for decades. The Eisenhower Expressway, which runs through it, has long been known as the “Heroin Highway” because of the volume of narcotics sold along it. Decades of divestment following the 1968 riots, coupled with the spread of heroin and the crack epidemic in the 1980s, cratered the local economy.
The confluence of such factors can make the promise of a better life seem out of reach. Cycles of poverty, trauma and violence are deeply enmeshed. While violence interrupters and elected officials in Chicago have taken different approaches to the problem — from direct outreach that addresses violence head-on to place-based strategies like block clubs — they all agree that the lack of economic opportunity is a root cause.
“When all of those things combine together, you build the perfect recipe for hopelessness,” said 11th Police District Councilor Alees Edwards. “And then people will begin to think differently about themselves, what they can accomplish, what is possible for them.”
While it’s hard to measure the effectiveness of any of these efforts, violence has declined across the city in recent years (and has seen a downward trend nationwide since the 1990s). Poverty on the West Side, however, has persisted. Whether gang-related or due to interpersonal conflicts, myriad factors influence every shooting.
One thing is clear: gun violence is highest in Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods.
Decades of divestment
Divestment and poverty have gripped the West Side for decades. But the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King marked a major turning point for the area.
On April 5, 1968, the community exploded in grief and rage as uprisings plunged the West Side into two nights of looting and arson in the wake of Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination in Memphis the previous day. Firefighters, protected by phalanxes of police, battled blazes that would consume 28 blocks and destroy hundreds of buildings. Before the rioting abated, eleven people were killed and thousands more were injured. Garfield Park’s business district never fully recovered.
Martin Coffer, the director of community relations and violence prevention at the faith-based nonprofit Breakthrough, grew up in Garfield Park. “When I was younger, we played outside,” said Coffer, who was born in 1965. “We knew everyone; there was a community connectedness.”
The crack epidemic in the 1980s and the proliferation of heroin that followed shattered that, he added. Parents grew fearful of letting their kids off the front stoop; the local playground became a no-man’s-land. Jobs grew scarce.
As a youth, Coffer worked at a shoe store on Madison and Pulaski. Now, young people don’t see such jobs in the community, he said.
“If we could change those opportunities, increase those opportunities and increase the investments in our community, I think that would definitely be a turn in the right direction,” he said, “because lack of opportunity, unemployment, those are root causes of violence.”
Research tends to agree. Studies have long shown strong links between poverty, joblessness, and violence. A 2022 University of Chicago Law Review analysis that looked at nearly a half-century of data in Chicago found that when violent crime increased overall between the 1960s and 1990s, the poorest parts of the city saw the highest jumps.
Like other violence-prevention organizations, Breakthrough incorporates job development into its programming; last year it provided employment services to 220 people, fifty-four of whom were placed in jobs.
The West Side has some of the most enduring and extreme poverty in the United States. Areas in which more than 20 percent of residents are below the federal poverty line for more than three decades are considered to have “persistent poverty” by the U.S. Census. Nearly all the Census tracts in Garfield Park have poverty rates above 20 percent. In some cases, more than half of residents are below the poverty line.
Unemployment has also been linked to gang affiliation and violence, and young people in impoverished communities face a catch-22: the lack of viable jobs drives some to join gangs and participate in illicit economies, which in turn heightens their exposure to violence and arrest, making jobs even harder to get.
In the Chicago area unemployment is about 5 percent overall, according to the Bureau of Labor statistics. Unemployment disproportionately impacts Black and Latino communities like those on the West Side; in the first quarter of 2025, Black men were nearly 1.7 times (up from 1.5 in 2024) as likely to be unemployed than Latino men and almost twice as likely as white men.
For those who can find entry-level employment Chicago’s $16.40 minimum wage is not quite enough to keep up with average monthly expenses, according to the data aggregator LivingCost.org. “The jobs [don’t pay] enough money, especially right now,” said Patty Carrillo, a West Humboldt Park block club captain. “We go to the grocery store and [buy] nothing and it’s $100 already.”
On the front lines
Breakthrough, INVC, CRED and other violence interruption organizers include workforce development, behavioral health counseling and job placement to enhance their direct outreach to people involved in violent altercations. That outreach attempts to prevent retaliatory shootings, set up non-aggression agreements among gangs, and pull people off the street. By combining these approaches with workforce development, they hope to break cycles of violence, one person at a time, for good.
Like Breakthrough, which is staffed by neighborhood residents, INVC provides paid training to people who have been enmeshed in violence to become outreach workers and break those cycles as outreach workers.
“There’s a measure of accountability, a measure of wanting to restore what you might have been contributing to in the past,” said Shunda Collins, INVC’s vice president of development and communications.
The direct-outreach model, now called “community violence intervention” or “CVI” by practitioners, was invented in the 1990s in Boston as Operation Ceasefire. It came to Chicago in 2000, originally as an initiative called CeaseFire Chicago, and has since been renamed Cure Violence. Cure Violence outreach workers have often been involved in violence themselves, are embedded in the communities they serve, and strictly refuse to share incriminating information with police even as they coordinate their efforts. The techniques developed by its creators have since been adopted by dozens of organizations in Chicago and across the country.
Samuel Castro, INVC’s director of strategic initiatives and partnerships, started out as an outreach worker. Castro, who spent a dozen years in prison on federal charges, was told about community violence intervention by his co-defendant. Outgoing and charismatic, he was a natural for the work.
“I think for most of us that’s in this space, sad to say that we were the ones who messed up these places, and then we see the outcomes now,” he said. “So that’s my personal fight.”
Castro’s nineteen-year-old son “lives that life” currently, he said, making his work doubly personal.
Frederick Seaton, an outreach supervisor at INVC, has done this work for eighteen years, beginning at CeaseFire. Keeping his four sons out of violence was part of what has made Seaton passionate about his work. “So I go out there on a daily basis, and me and my team continue to build relationships with individuals within the community,” he said.
Exposure to violence and other forms of trauma at a young age doesn’t always predict later involvement with gangs, but some studies have found links between them. When people are exposed to violence in their youth, there can be adverse impacts on their mental health. To combat this, INVC offers behavioral health services to both clients and outreach workers.
Understanding those impacts is part of what makes those who were formerly perpetrators of violence well-suited to reach those still embroiled in violent activities.
Antonio Daniels, a former gang member who got involved in violence prevention after finding God, is now the director of volunteer and church engagement at Breakthrough. He said building relationships is key. “I got a neighbor on my block that says, ‘Before you correct, you must connect,” he said. “Really just getting to know people on their own terms.”
Block clubs connect neighbors
Block clubs, a staple of Black communities in Chicago since the Great Migration, are one way neighbors connect. They’re free to organize and register with the city, giving residents a way to interface with city departments. They often beautify their blocks, and can even push illicit activity away. Since 2008, Chicagoans have founded nearly 700 block clubs—a quarter of them on the West Side.
In 2019, Bryan Ramson purchased a four-flat in Garfield Park. The building needed significant renovations, and he rehabbed it himself; renters moved in the following year. Ramson, a thirty-seven-year-old neutrino physicist at Fermilab, grew up in “grinding poverty” in New Orleans’ Ninth and Seventh Wards and has lived in Washington D.C. and Detroit.
The neighborhood was one of the few places he could afford property. “Because of how wealth inequality works, it’s harder and harder to afford a house,” he said. “Neighborhoods like Garfield Park are going to be extremely valuable and extremely relevant towards the young people who are trying to find ways to grab their version of the American Dream.”
Before he closed on the property, Ramson saw a couple of young men standing outside of it, but didn’t immediately realize they were selling drugs.
“What we found is that there was basically lawlessness in front of our house,” he said. “The owners of this overnight drug market were just uninterested in trying to work with the people who lived on the block.” Ramson, who was elected to the 11th Police District Council in 2023, organized a block club to reclaim the street. It took months of work and a confrontation that sent Ramson to the hospital — but they saw success. The block has been clear for the last couple of years.
“There seems to be folks trying to come back in and sort of reclaim the space for open-air drug markets” recently, Ramson said. But thanks to the block club, “we already have a game plan and a playbook by which to start really trying to prevent that from happening.”
Nonprofits take similar place-based approaches to curbing violence. In 2010, Breakthrough workers began reclaiming a playground a few blocks east of the Garfield Park Conservatory, from gang members.
“Families couldn’t go to the playground,” Coffer said. “What we did was institute what we call a ‘home court.’ It’s like a block club on steroids.”
Every summer Friday, Breakthrough workers host a basketball tournament, bring in a bounce house and pass out food. “With that consistency, right now, if you go over there, the park is clear,” Coffer said.
“Consistency has been one of those things that our community struggles with,” added Damien Morris, Breakthrough’s chief program officer for violence prevention. “You get temporary funding; you start to gain momentum. And then next year, the funding isn’t there.”
Coffer lives near the intersection of Pulaski and Jackson in West Garfield Park.
“At one time we just thought we were all alone,” he said. “But when you’re able to engage in a block club or something like that, we find out that you’re not by yourself. There’s organizations; there’s other neighbors who want a safe space. So then they feel empowered.”
Ramson said making his street safer wasn’t easy. It took communication with 28th Ward Ald. Jason Ervin and West Side Block Club Association founder Talei Thompson to make something happen, but the block club eventually got the city to install speed bumps and surveillance cameras. Tensions between Ramson and the dealers came to a head when he decided to sit in the street in a lawn chair to interrupt their activity.
“Eventually one of them assaulted me,” he said. He was left bloodied, but came back.
The confrontation changed the dynamic on the block: the men saw that Ramson wasn’t going to back down, and the attack got the attention of the police. By working with Thompson, violence interrupters, police and the community, the block club saw results.
As a police district councilor, “I have a much better understanding of how to apply pressure to the situation without putting myself directly in harm’s way,” he said. “It really is paying attention, being active, and being consistent in the application of pressure to your goals. And then having a group of people to do that with you, that’s going to be the main strategy.”
Carrillo, the block club captain in West Humboldt Park, took a similar approach. She has lived on Monticello near Grand Avenue for twenty-two years, and founded the block club in 2019 after a group of young men took over the corner to sell drugs. In its first year, her club organized a block party that was so successful, she said the dealers called the cops to complain that the club had shut down the block.
“We stopped, literally, we stopped business for them,” she said.
On a recent Sunday morning in May, a half a dozen volunteers in bright pink vests walked down both sides of Monticello, pausing here and there to pick up trash. At the end of the block, they chatted in a garden, one of three the local block club had planted in vacant lots. The gardens, along with community events like this and block parties are all strategies the block club has used to build connections with one another and to push drug dealing off the block.
A few high-end new homes stick out from the block’s otherwise modest mid-century two-flats. Carillo said they’d been built on vacant lots since the block club began beautifying the street. With them came higher property values — part of a citywide trend, and also driven by gentrification in Humboldt Park pushing farther west — but the increase has squeezed long-time homeowners like her.
“We don’t like these kinds of houses here, because, yes, it’s getting expensive,” Carillo said. “I just, I don’t know. I mean, it’s good and not.”
Crime has also recently returned. Carillo shared a video of two men, one of whom held what looked like a gun, stealing a catalytic converter from a car on Monticello earlier that morning. She said the block club planned to attend an upcoming community meeting with the police commander to try to get answers.
The People’s Plan
Johnson’s “People’s Plan for Community Safety,” which triages communities most impacted by violence and aims to address root causes such as poverty, food insecurity, and unemployment, is novel on a citywide level. His administration is the first to have an Office for Community Safety, and Garien Gatewood, Johnson’s first-ever deputy mayor for community safety, comes from the nonprofit sector.
Like Gatewood, the approaches of the People’s Plan are rooted in nonprofits. Its centerpiece is a massive summer jobs program, which is set to hire 29,000 youth ages fourteen to twenty-four for seven weeks this summer—an increase of 1,000 from 2024. Johnson’s administration is also piloting a hiring program that places high school graduates in jobs with the Department of Streets and Sanitation. Together, the state, county and city have committed more than $100 million to violence-prevention initiatives in 2025.
In a recent midterm interview with the South Side Weekly, Johnson wouldn’t take direct credit for this year’s drop in violent crime (shootings citywide are thus far down 25 percent from last year). But it’s clear that he thinks the People’s Plan is working.
“One of the things that we did, we looked at thirty-five of the most violent beats in Chicago,” he said. “We saw some similarities within those beats. These are places where schools were closed, where public housing was shuttered, where disinvestment was the prevailing form of governance. And what my theory was: if we can reduce violence in the most violent sections of the city of Chicago, we could take that citywide. And that is starting to play out.”
Separately, the mayor’s “Take Back the Block” program is similar to Breakthrough’s place-based “home court” approach. The program targeted half a dozen violence-prone spots on the South and West Sides last year, flooded them with resources from multiple city agencies, and held three-day events at each.
“I think the work that we did with Take Back the Block, if you really broke it down, would be a mini-version of the People’s Plan for Community Safety, where you flood this area with resources and support and you literally have the entire [mayoral] cabinet coming out,” Gatewood said.
At the events, city officials listened to residents’ concerns. The primary resource neighborhood residents said they needed? “Jobs.”
To meet that need, the Mayor’s Office brought in the Chicago Cook Workforce Partnership, which administers federal funding for jobs training. At one Take Back the Block event, more than forty people were hired on the spot.
It’s too early to tell if the events will have the same lasting impact that Breakthrough achieved at West Side playgrounds, but an Illinois Answers/South Side Weekly analysis found four of the six police beats Take Back the Block targeted had fewer shootings in 2024 than the previous year, while one had the same number in both years. Only one, in Roosevelt Square, a public housing development near Little Italy, had more. That beat is in a Census tract where more than half of the residents are below the poverty line.
West Side Block Club Association President Talei Thomson leads a march for peace into Garfield Park in May 2025. Credit: Jim Daley 
The Windy City Ramblers led a march for peace through the West Side in May 2025. Credit: Jim Daley 
Young men look on as members of the Windy City Ramblers lead a march for peace through the West Side. Credit: Jim Daley 
Windy CIty Ramblers musicians dance during a march for peace on the West Side. Credit: Jim Daley 
West Side Block Club Association President Talei Thomson (center, in Morehouse sweater) poses with antiviolence leaders after a May 2025 march for peace. Credit: Jim Daley
The uneven results present “an opportunity for growth,” Gatewood said.
Edwards said she appreciated that the Mayor’s Office reached out to community members to shape the Plan. But she added that it’s not nearly enough to address the centuries of systemic harm wrought on Black communities.
“There is zero reason that the government is not looking into an immediate strategy and coming up with reparations,” she said.
The challenge of tracking impact
Violence prevention is challenging work. There are more than 100 gang-affiliated cliques on the West Side, and navigating that landscape makes outreach efforts and nonaggression pacts a complex and difficult task. Furthermore, not all gun violence stems from gangs, and it’s harder to prevent shootings that arise from organic interpersonal conflict, robberies, and other unknown factors. Seaton and Castro described incredulously watching a recent news report about a shooting that was tagged as gang-related; the outreach workers knew full well it hadn’t been.
Measuring the impact of outreach, job training and other interventions is even more difficult.
The causes of violence are myriad, and even harder to grasp are the factors influencing recent declines in violence.
“Data shows how many people got shot, how many people were killed. There’s no way for me to capture how many lives were saved by deescalating,” Castro said. “When we are in those gangways and the alleys at night, and calming people down from going to retaliate, there’s no number on that. I can’t tell you how many lives were affected because we have that relationship.”
INVC’s Shunda Collins noted that last year, INVC had hundreds of conflict mediations. “We likely prevented a shooting, at least from what we know, 955 times,” Collins said. “And then [with] the skills and training people are getting…the number’s even higher.”
It’s also unclear how best to measure impact. Part of the problem is trying to measure outreach efforts with traditional criminal-justice metrics, said Chicago CRED staffer Jalon Arthur at an event with the City Club of Chicago in April.
“When you think about metrics to actually gauge success for CVI [community violence interruption], we’re talking about things like mediations, non-aggression agreements, the number of individuals and groups receiving services,” he said.
Conversely, police gauge success by looking at gun recoveries, arrests, and clearance rates. “You will always run into problems when you look at CVI through a criminal-justice lens,” he added. “It needs to be looked at through a public-health lens.”
Outreach workers are certainly having an impact, however—and research is starting to catch on. A study published in April by researchers at Northwestern University found that outreach efforts are contributing to recent declines in gun violence in dozens of “hotspots” across Chicago’s South and West Sides. The study found a 41 percent drop in shootings at locations where outreach workers with the Peacekeepers Program maintained a presence.
By comparing years when the program operated only in the summer to those where it was year-round, the study was able to more directly correlate Peacekeeper activity to shooting declines. Importantly, the study also assessed how long “peace intervals,” or periods without shootings, persisted, in addition to the average shooting victimization rates. Still, the study acknowledges that declines in hotspots “align with broader citywide reductions in gun violence.”
While the Peacekeeper Program, like other outreach programs, uses a variety of interventions in their work, its primary function is to quite literally have people on the streets, ready to safely de-escalate conflict. The state has invested $34.5 million in the Peacekeepers this year.
In a recent interview, Gatewood pointed to April’s historic low in homicides citywide. In the next breath he noted that at the time of the interview, thirteen people had been fatally shot (seven more would be killed before the month ended). “Those are…at least thirteen families whose lives have been changed drastically forever,” he said. “So how do we, on one hand, celebrate the lives that we’re saving, hold people accountable for the lives that are being taken, and make sure we support the families who are struggling through some of the worst times of their lives?”
For violence-prevention workers like Castro, it’s done one person at a time.
When the young man who’d been shot told him he was ready for a job, Castro asked him why.
“‘Well, you stood in my life no matter what,’” he recalled the man saying. “‘You didn’t let me down, no judgement. And now I have a son — I have to make a change.’” He’s now a staff member at INVC.
Castro attended the baby shower.
Jim Daley is the Weekly’s investigations editor.
