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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowThe Indianapolis Foundation, in partnership with Indianapolis Mayor Joe Hogsett, announced Monday the not-for-profits that were chosen to receive a total of $12.13 million in grants to address root causes of violence.
Seventy-two organizations will get a total of 159 grants from the Elevation Grant program.
The Indianapolis Foundation chose recipients using an equity framework, according to a news release. It gave priority to organizations that “clearly demonstrate immediate intentionality around violence reduction and support programs using evidence-based violence-reduction programming or promising strategies that, in addition, elevate the assets, aspirations, hope, and improve the safety of neighborhoods impacted by violence.”
Organizations that offer support services involving employment, mentoring, recreation, mental health and family support are among those that are considered for the grants.
More than 60% of the recipient organizations are Black- or people of color-led, according to Pamela Ross, vice president of community leadership and equitable initiatives for The Indianapolis Foundation.
Previously called the Violent Crime Reduction Grant Program, it was renamed last year to emphasize positive change in neighborhoods.
The anti-violence fund is backed by $45 million in American Rescue Plan Act dollars to be spent over the span of three years. The COVID-related infusion began in 2022. The Indianapolis Foundation, part of the Central Indiana Community Foundation, selects recipients.
Ten not-for-profits received a maximum grant award of $250,000:
- Faith in Indiana
- Felege Hiywot Center Inc.
- Martindale-Brightwood Community Development Corp.
- Flanner House of Indianapolis
- We Bloom Inc.
- Eclectic Soul Voices Corp.
- Judah Ministries
- Martin University
- PACE Inc.
- Neighborhood Christian Legal Clinic
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Hopefully we are done with the midnight basketball nonsense.
Second, try locking up criminals. The whole low bail to no bail has been a
disaster.
Crime in our city is driving our lack of population growth and lack of jobs
and economic development coming into Marion County.
Sorry, Keith, this is more of the “root causes of violence” balderdash, funneled through an “equity framework”, meaning it’s 90% grift (about the same percentage that will line the pockets of the Exec Dirs of the recipient organizations). And, since it operates under the mentality that social inequality is a “root cause”, fully ignoring individual culpability, to instead favor macroeconomic goalpost shifting, that remaining 10% won’t do a thing. Bad people will continue behave badly, and if they don’t face consequence for their bad behavior, the aggregate impact will worsen over time.
All it takes is a basic understanding of human nature to see that this won’t work. But of course that basic understanding is missing from all the key figures in this initiative.
Lauren: Do you have sources for your numbers, or did you just make them up to support your accusation of “grift”?
Greg, do we have audits performed on these initiatives in the past? Any numbers to show that these initiatives have worked?
The best evidence we will have that the money is actually benefiting is if we genuinely do see crime and violence rates go back down. If we can get them down to the glory days of, of I don’t know–2017?–I’ll eat my words. Otherwise my point stands.
Lauren B.
+1
Agreed completely.
Lauren – this is about the monthly interest we as taxpayers are on the hook for the note on Lucas Oil Stadium.
I agree we need some form of accountability around the success of these programs – but on such a meaningless amount of money I think we can just throw darts at the wall and see if anything actually sticks
Lauren: You seem to like to throw around numbers that have no basis in fact. That was my “point”. I’m old-fashioned, perhaps, but think when you accuse people of “grift” you should back it up with something besides opinion and supposition. I’m more suspicious of people who are constantly running their mouths and tearing down other peoples’ efforts to try and improve the conditions that they, themselves, are constantly complaining about.
Greg M.
You have to ask yourself. What is their track record of success.
You don’t know anymore than what you accuse Lauren of not knowing.
Our violent crime has only increased.
Keith B.: I never said I DID know, did I? The issue I had was her accusing people of being grifters, without any evidence, while using fictitious numbers. Some might call that slander.
Greg–
The best evidence we would have that this approach for “violence reduction” actually works would be a decrease homicides. Note that I say “homicides” and not “crime”.
Various other crimes can either go unreported, or cultural/social differences may question the threshold of whether something is criminal or not (think #MeToo movement), or we could have dishonest players seeking to suppress crime data for political gain.
But a dead body is quite hard to lie about. Or if a person goes missing and can’t be traced. Even the most talented organized crime rings can’t fully sweep a corpse under the rug. Someone eventually starts asking questions.
The tally marks for dead bodies in Indianapolis (and most other cities) has gone from bad to awful in the last 5 years. Yet we’re doubling down on the “equity framework” solutions that, even if they didn’t directly get us where we are today, certainly haven’t helped to prevent it.
I’m sure some of these nonprofits have excellent intentions and don’t deliberately try to mislead the public. Many of them are well known have been around for awhile. But then, charitable organizations are less likely than private companies to go belly up simply because they do a bad job. They might not be corrupt, they might not even be incompetent; they might simply be misguided by Pollyannaish solutions that don’t translate into actual violence reduction. Hence, more dead bodies.
Lauren, I repeat: My issue was with you accusing people of malfeasance with no evidence, as well as inventing numbers out of thin air. For all your suggestions of others being dishonest for political gain, it seems to me that’s exactly what you’ve done here (i.e. projection). If your point was a strong one, obviously, you wouldn’t need to do that.
As for your body counts, there were 15.7% fewer criminal homicides in Indianapolis in 2022 compared to 2021. The first six months of this year were trending 8.6% fewer than in 2022. (I have not seen more recent numbers.)
How could you possibly know that any of these groups you took off after haven’t “helped to prevent” criminal homicides? Could it be the problem might be worse, and thus the numbers getting higher rather than receding, if they hadn’t been working in the community?
Further, I challenge your contention/assumption that they were working their same program for many years leading up to the spikes we saw in 2020/2021, and therefore didn’t help to prevent them. There has been an obvious shift in approach since the events of 2020, one you clearly don’t like, but how does it make sense to say we should go back to doing things the way we were leading up to the worst years on record?
Finally, absent from all of this pontification, is the role that less regulated and easier accessed guns play in the vast majority of these crimes. The city can’t do a damn thing about that but hope to mitigate the damage. If you’re not willing to admit that makes everyone’s job (including law enforcement) more difficult, then you’re being selective in choosing the targets of your umbrage.
You clearly have strong ideological commitment to community based non-profits, to the point that if I voice my skepticism about their integrity and efficacy, I’m committing “slander”. My cynicism comes from years of volunteering for similar organizations, though I will withhold judgment on the individual ones listed here. Maybe some of them will do a good job. But even if they aren’t crooked, this is just doing the same thing we’ve been doing for years and expecting different results.
A desperate attempt to portray 2022 as better than 2021 isn’t going to negate the fact that the 2020s in general have been significantly worse than the 2010s. I mean, if we took a line graph from 2013 to 2023 and showed it to someone in 2013, they would likely say, “Good Lord! What happened around 2020?” Let’s remember that the crime spike wasn’t even until about midway through that year…not at the start of the asinine COVID imprisonment.
And, yes, of course, the “role that less regulated and easier accessed guns play”–a role they play even in cities/states with some of the most restrictive gun laws in the nation. Given that criminally minded thugs will find a way to get guns even in places where they’re almost completely illegal (did you hear about the recent mass shooting in Belgium?), you’re right–I’m selective in choosing the targets of my umbrage.
On one thing we can agree, yes, there most certainly has been “an obvious shift in approach since the events of 2020” since I don’t like massively high homicide rates, you have me there! I guess you’re just cooler with high body counts and a weak, feckless DA system, and a collapsing rate of closed cases. Indianapolis was a model, IIRC, as recently as the late 2000s and even had a TV show depicting how good it was at solving homicides. What is it like today?
I mean, we WERE doing something in the 90s, 00s, and 10s that caused crimes to generally trend downward. And now they’re back up to levels not seen since the 70s and 80s.
Lauren – You can be as cynical as you choose to be. I used the word slander after reading your comment “it’s 90% grift (about the same percentage that will line the pockets of the Exec Dirs of the recipient organizations)”. That’s a very specific accusation, and an attack on the integrity of the individuals involved whom you know nothing about. It has nothing to do with any sort of commitment to the groups themselves. Don’t intentionally confuse the point.
As for the rest of it, we can continue to go back/forth and likely never agree, mainly because there’s no possible way to boil down the rate of criminal homicides to any one particular reason or set of absolutes. Everything doesn’t fit neatly into anyone’s narrative. Just as I found it ridiculous to blame a group of grant recipients for being part of the problem (that they’re trying to address), I find it disgusting that your response to my challenging your assumptions is to accuse me of being “cooler with high body counts” because I don’t subscribe to your ideology.