Public safety nonprofits across New York City say they’re scrambling to fill major funding gaps after the Trump administration terminated millions of dollars in antiviolence grants this year — and warn the city could face an uptick in violence if the money isn’t replaced.
Five organizations working in New York City to reduce gun violence, aid crime victims, house domestic violence survivors and counsel at-risk youth say the cuts have forced them to lay off staff and scale back services. The groups say those reductions have already hampered their ability to connect with the residents most affected by crime, and they worry recent progress in those neighborhoods could be jeopardized.
Nearly 20 city-based organizations lost roughly $60 million in overall funding when the U.S. Department of Justice terminated more than $800 million in national grants, according to the nonprofit Council on Criminal Justice and Reuters. U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi tweeted in April the department was slashing “millions of dollars in wasteful grants,” and mocked outreach programs for vulnerable people.
Cincere Wilson, a former “peace broker” at Exodus Transitional Community in East Harlem who was laid off in April when the grant funding dried up, said some of the young people he’d been mentoring landed in jail for offenses like gun possession and attempted murder after losing the structure and resources the organization provided them.
Before the cuts, Wilson and his colleagues would patrol the neighborhood into the night, aiming to diffuse tensions among youth and checking on their mentees. They also advocated for young people in the criminal justice system and led three group meetings a week with teens court-mandated into the program as an alternative to incarceration.
“There are a few participants that I actually fear for their life if we are not there, because of the activities and stuff that they're involved with,” Wilson said. “ When they don't spend the time with our programs and doing the things we have them do, then they're in the street.”
The same month Bondi announced the cuts, affected organizations received an email stating the DOJ had “changed its priorities” for discretionary grants to focus more on “law enforcement operations” and “combatting violent crime,” according to a copy obtained by Gothamist.
Many of the grants were funded through the 2022 Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, a landmark law meant to address root causes of crime and gun violence, such as mental health crises, racial disparities and a lack of economic opportunity.
“It was one of the first and most important pieces of legislation to address violence and gun crimes in decades,” said Amy Solomon, a senior fellow at the Council on Criminal Justice who served as an assistant attorney general at DOJ under President Joe Biden. Organizations applied for violence intervention grants on the promise they’d receive the money into 2026.
But the Trump administration rescinded those and other public safety grants, upending groups’ plans for using the funding. Besides community violence intervention, grants were earmarked for policing and law enforcement as well as prisoner re-entry and corrections programs.
“It's unprecedented to cut off grants midstream en masse in this way,” Solomon said.
‘We’re still doing what we can’
A group of nonprofits, including the Brooklyn-based Vera Institute of Justice, challenged the cuts in federal court in May. Mayor Eric Adams’ administration and other local governments filed briefs backing the lawsuit, but a district court judge dismissed it in July, saying while the cuts were “shameful,” the court lacked jurisdiction in the case.
The legal challenge could soon move to the U.S. Court of Federal Claims following an appeal ruling, according to Insha Rahman, vice president of advocacy and partnerships at Vera.
“The federal government exists … to invest in programs, services and solutions that actually work to make our lives better, and not to do the exact opposite of what the evidence tells us,” Rahman said.
A CUNY study on Exodus’ peace brokers program found staff mediated more than 38 “high-risk” conflicts and served more than 200 young people from 2023 to 2024. The study said that had a significant effect on shootings. And during that time, shootings in East Harlem’s 25th Precinct dropped by half, according to NYPD data.
The grant cancellation slashed the program, including $150 weekly stipends for participants as an incentive to attend meetings.
Even without the funding, laid-off employees like Wilson say their work is too important to give up, so they’re putting in the same hours for no pay. They say they’ve been struggling to afford food and rent.
“I can't have a 15- or 16-year-old kid saying, ‘Hey, you know what? You failed me,’” Gregory Ellis, another former Exodus staffer, said in April. “So even though we don't have any finances, we're still doing what we can.”
Exodus' facility on East 123rd Street and Third Avenue in East Harlem
In September, the Department of Justice put out a new call for $35 million in grants under the violence intervention initiative it had rolled back months earlier. But many of the groups that won funding in 2022 no longer appear eligible: According to an application notice, city, county and tribal governments can participate, with the grants tailored to “law enforcement efforts to reduce violent crime and improve police-community relations.” Community-based organizations that deploy credible messengers — trusted peers who use their own experiences with the criminal justice system to prevent violence — are effectively barred from direct funding.
DOJ spokesperson Natalie Baldassarre said its new grant guidelines will help the department double down on supporting law enforcement agencies and “ensure the efficient use of taxpayer dollars."
“The department has full faith that local law enforcement can effectively utilize these resources to restore public safety in cities across America,” she said in a statement.
‘Like a rock dropped on us’
Staff at the five nonprofits Gothamist interviewed described a series of domino effects that rippled through their work and communities after the cuts.
When its $666,000 DOJ grant was revoked, the Bronx Osborne Gun Accountability and Prevention initiative could not accept as many young people into its yearlong diversion program offering cognitive behavioral therapy, mentorship, job training and intervention workshops in lieu of a prison sentence. The program — developed by the nonprofit Osborne Association and the Bronx district attorney’s office — serves teens and young adults charged with carrying guns in the borough and said it lost a third of its funding due to the cuts.
“It was like a rock dropped on us,” said Maurice De Freitas, a former program manager who was laid off along with one of the initiative’s credible messengers.
Losing $200,000 in funding has made it harder for the Asiyah Women's Center in Bay Ridge to provide legal services and health care to domestic violence survivors. Shaniyat Turani, the shelter’s development programs specialist, said the city’s domestic violence rates, which have spiked in recent years, could worsen due to the cuts.
“When we're taking away social benefits from people who need it the most, they're often held captive by their abusers,” he said.
It’s a hard pill to swallow.
Staff members at LIFE Camp, an antiviolence organization based in Southeast Queens, say scaling back services after losing grant funding means the group no longer has enough money for street patrols on Mondays. Executive Director Tiffany Lamela pointed to the fatal shooting of 13-year-old Sanjay Samuel, who authorities say was gunned down on a Monday morning in September by a 16-year-old during a fight outside a Dunkin’ store in Cambria Heights.
“There's so many things that we might have been able to do. There would've been an actual person there to be able to deescalate, to prevent anything from happening,” Lamela said. “It’s a hard pill to swallow.”
Cincere Wilson points at a whiteboard used for organizing mentees and workshops at Exodus' office.
Stalled momentum
Solomon, the former assistant attorney general, sounded excited in her speech at a 2024 national community violence intervention conference in Chicago as she addressed hundreds of professionals working to combat violence. She said the conference, then in its second year, still felt like the “beginning of a new chapter in our country” where DOJ grantees were getting help supporting “often overlooked and underfunded” communities.
A year later, more than $150 million in Justice Department grants to those organizations was cut. The rest of the approximately $800 million in overall slashed grants bankrolled a wide range of programs, including hate crime prevention, mental health care for police, and work against human trafficking.
“It's impacting not only what is happening in high-risk neighborhoods … but it also is really stopping what was a movement, where this bunch of experts and ambassadors and credible messengers were expanding and professionalizing and building,” Solomon told Gothamist in a recent interview.
Organizations said they are looking to private funders to make up for the lost grants, but most don’t believe this would fully replace those dollars.
“There’s so many competitive private fundraising institutions that are going to give out grants, but it’s like we're fighting for crumbs at the same time because it still doesn't make up the amount that the DOJ has provided,” Turani from Asiyah Women’s Center said.
On a chilly evening in East Harlem, local young adults wearing puffer jackets and hoodies sat in folding chairs around a circle in Exodus’ old office space. Wilson, the laid-off staffer, was there with several sheets of paper — prompts to help the group delve into topics like accountability, racism, emotional wellbeing and good decision-making.
He and some of his former colleagues have created a spinoff organization called Myra’s Kids to continue their antiviolence and counseling work following the federal cuts, and are hoping to secure funding from private donors.
Jesiah Fernandez, 23, said being a part of the Exodus circle has helped him “keep a level head” and make better choices. He remembered the way he felt after visiting his father behind bars as a kid.
“I don't want to repeat that cycle,” Fernandez told Gothamist. “ I feel like the program definitely helped me reroute myself, helped me open a vision, open a world.”
