Kyle Hucke

The Illinois Cannabis Regulation and Tax Act created the Restore, Reinvest, and Renew (R3) program, which reinvests a portion of cannabis tax revenue into communities experiencing high rates of gun injury, unemployment, child poverty, and incarceration. These grant funds support programming in five priority areas: civil legal aid, economic development, reentry services, violence prevention services, and youth development. This report details site-specific process evaluations on the implementation and operations of select R3 grantees throughout Illinois. Researchers utilized a mixed methods approach and varied data sources by evaluation site. These sources included observations, interviews, surveys, focus groups, and administrative data. Overall, researchers found that 1) programs valued the needs and input of the communities they served and tailored services to meet those needs; 2) programs faced implementation delays due to funding administration and COVID-19 challenges; 3) programs varied greatly in terms of data collection and evaluation capacity; 4) assessment and planning programs successfully brought together relevant stakeholders and service delivery programs were typically successful in meeting goals for clients served.

The street-level violence prevention field includes a range of professionals fulfilling specific roles in various programs. This literature review focuses on violence interrupters as a specific type of outreach worker and the programs that utilize them. Violence interrupters embed themselves within specific areas of communities experiencing elevated levels of violence and mediate emerging conflicts between groups and/or individuals to interrupt the cycle of violence. This review describes the theoretical frameworks guiding the design of these programs, the role of violence interrupters, and program implementations. It also summarizes results from the research literature that evaluates these programs. The literature suggests that violence interrupters are successful at reaching the target population. The research on the effects of these programs on community violence shows that most experience initial success followed by challenges maintaining that success. Program instability from funding and employee turnover likely reduce the effectiveness of VI programs. The dangerous and stressful nature of the work and the relatively poor level of monetary compensation drives the high turnover of VIs. The high social and economic cost of violence suggests that VI programs “pay for themselves” by preventing violence. Overall, evidence suggests violence interrupters are a valuable part of the violence prevention field, but researchers, practitioners, and policy makers need to be aware of violence interrupters’ strengths, limitations, and the supports needed for them to work effectively.