Yvonne Miller was beside herself with grief when her 23-year-old son, Christopher B Kelly, died from gun violence in August 2020. She connected with the Trauma & Resilience Initiative, a Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, mental health non-profit, and executive director Karen Crawford Simms soon showed up at her door to help her process her trauma.
Every week, Simms encouraged Miller to cherish the memories of her son and offered her a space to cry. At Simms’s suggestion, Miller kept a diary in which she documented the ebb and flow of denial and anger.
Through in-person and virtual sessions with Simms, Miller climbed her way out of the initial stages of grief. In 2023, she even created a weekly support group for mothers in the metropolitan area who have lost their children to gun violence, “because nobody knows what we’re going through”, Miller said, “except us”.
But the neighbor-to-neighbor counseling, which helped Miller cope, is no more. The non-profit’s funding from the American Rescue Plan Act (Arpa), a Biden-era stimulus bill, ran out. And the organization had to end its crisis support for gun-violence survivors in July. Before then, Simms and her team had offered a free 40-hour training program to community members in areas with gun violence, as well as to providers who work with people experiencing homelessness, formerly incarcerated people and religious congregation members. From the non-profit’s founding in 2019 until funding recently ran out, Simms and her team trained more than 500 people in Champaign-Urbana.
If the Trauma & Resilience Initiative can’t find other grants, it may close in December. Its potential closure mirrors the fate of other organizations nationwide that focus on community violence and also rely on Arpa funds that will expire by the end of 2026. And now, under the Trump administration, there are even fewer federal resources for such programs. In April, the Department of Justice’s office of justice programs canceled 373 grants totaling about $500m. Some of that amount went toward violence reduction, according to a recent report from the non-profit Council on Criminal Justice.
“Arpa was really a gamechanger for the community violence intervention and prevention field,” said Nick Wilson, senior director for gun violence prevention at the Center for American Progress, in Governing magazine. “Arpa was really a chance for cities to really experiment and scale up existing programs, and especially for a lot of places,…
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