After DOJ Pulls Millions for Public Safety, Nonprofits and Neighborhoods Step In

JACKSON, Mississippi — Sharon Brown seemed destined from birth to be a changemaker in her hometown. She grew up reading old newspaper clippings about her mother and aunt protesting for women’s rights in the 1960s, and watching them help neighbors with whatever they could — from child care to groceries.

Years later, her mother urged Brown and her sister to push lawmakers to let voters decide on removing the Confederate emblem from Mississippi’s flag. Their 2015 petition fell short, but when the new flag rose over the Capitol in 2021 without the emblem, Brown’s resolve to continue her family’s legacy deepened.

“Especially around Jackson,” Brown, 53, told Capital B. “I’m always greeted with love and respect, because I come in love and I come with respect.”

When she was hired in June as Jackson’s director of the Office of Violence Prevention and Trauma Recovery, Brown thought she could finally bring her community projects connected to human trafficking, housing, agriculture, and gun violence into city government. But just 33 days after a new mayor was elected, she was fired.

Her firing came amid the Trump’s administration’s contraction of support for local anti-violence programs. More than $800 million of federal funds through the Justice Department’s Office of Justice Programs were slashed, and many initiatives tied to diversity, equity, and inclusion were dismantled.

“It just blew my mind,” she said. “Not because I was let go, because I’ll do the work whether I’m sitting in the office or I’m sitting on the street corner by the stop sign. The needs are still there, the work will continue.”

Jackson has the highest homicide rate in the country per capita, and was near the bottom of a list of safest cities in the U.S. 

Where federal and state governments have fallen short in allocating consistent funds for community safety, national nonprofits like the Alliance for Safety and Justice and the Community Based Public Safety Collective are stepping in. Through its Scaling Safety pilot program, the organization is dividing $63 million to established community groups in five cities — including Jackson — to deepen its impact over the next five years. The funding supports salaries, infrastructure, and operations, allowing these organizations to focus on reducing violence and building safer neighborhoods.

Scaling Safety’s goal is to reduce violence in its targeted cities by 50%, said Lenore Anderson, co-founder and president for Alliance for Safety and Justice.

Austin, Texas; Cleveland; Tucson, Arizona; and Miami are also part of the pilot program. The cities represent a mix of high-need areas where violence and trauma are concentrated, have some base of community-led public-safety work, and offer strategic diversity for proving and scaling a new approach to safety, she said.

Unlike past government cycles of investing and divesting in community safety, this initiative reflects lessons championed by the Alliance for Safety and Justice: that consistent, community-led resources — not bigger policing budgets — drive lasting reductions in crime. 

“There’s so many leaders in neighborhoods all over the country, and they have not been given a real seat at the table or basic support,” Anderson said. “You have mothers running healing circles for victims of violence. People who literally go to every shooting scene and help families. There’s people working inside hospitals trying to prevent retaliation by meeting people bedside who are gunshot victims.”

“I mean, this is literally life-saving work,” she said. “A lot of what we’re trying to do is say, ‘Hey, here’s some resources.’” 

The Office of Justice Programs, the DOJ’s main grant-making division, once supported hundreds of such nonprofits before funding cuts took hold. The Vera Institute of Justice — one of the nonprofits cut off by the administration — sued to get the funding reinstated for themselves and hundreds of affected organizations nationwide, but a federal judge dismissed the case in July, calling the DOJ’s actions “shameful.” Vera has since filed an appeal.

When the money dries up, the work doesn’t stop 

Major corporations like Walmart and Target have scaled back their philanthropy work to comply with President Donald Trump’s anti-DEI executive order, and nonprofits nationwide have been forced to cut operations or close entirely, as JustLeadershipUSA did in April when millions of federal funds were canceled. That didn’t concern Brown. When she saw economic and social injustices, as well as food insecurities, around Jackson, she sprung into action. 

“We’ve been calling, and we’ve been inviting philanthropy to invest in those types of strategies consistently, and they haven’t gotten there just yet,” said Aqeela Sherrills, co-lead of Scaling Safety. “Because a lot of folks really still don’t understand what community-based public safety, community violence intervention is.” 

Sherrills, a former Grape Street Crip who helped broker the 1992 peace treaty between rival gangs in Los Angeles’ Watts neighborhood, went on to play a key role in reducing crime in Newark, New Jersey. In 2014, Mayor Ras Baraka tapped him to lead the city’s Neighborhood Community Street Team, a model that has since set the standard for other high-crime communities. 

From police, prisons, probation, prosecutors, parole, and corrections, millions of dollars are poured into the criminal justice systems in order for it to operate. “It’s a whole massive public bureaucracy,” said Anderson, an attorney and founder of Californians for Safety and Justice. 

“These are agencies that really take so much of the resources away from what could be a much more balanced approach to public safety,” she said. “There’s a whole range of things that could be done, and we need that money to be available for these other strategies.” 

After the Trump administration cut off federal funds, the Alliance for Safety and Justice raised $850,000 for 12 organizations across the country to create 2-minute sizzle reels to use to attract new investors and funders, said Sherrills, senior adviser for the Alliance for Safety and Justice’s Shared Safety Initiative. 

“It’s important that we shape the narrative around this work,” he said. “We’re constantly seeking to raise capital to be able to get Netflix to do a series around the community violence intervention practitioners in the field and how we actually do the work.”

Sherrills said HBO’s cult classic The Wire and similar television series overshadow the work of community-led groups working toward reducing violence. The focus is often on the police and an endless cycle of violence. These shows, he said, reinforce misperceptions.

Partnering with the community, law enforcement, and emergency services are key to crime reduction, said Sherrills, who is also the founder of Community-Based Public Safety Collective, a national nonprofit that helps mediate conflicts and build relationships in high-risk neighborhoods.  

Even as the Trump administration’s policies have influenced the elimination of DEI programs, the Ben & Jerry’s Foundation remains an exception. Through its National Grassroots Organizing Program, launched in 2019, the foundation continues to fund community-led justice initiatives across the country. Similarly, the Scaling Safety initiative is helping sustain groups like Circle of Brotherhood in Miami, which also felt the strain of the terminated federal dollars, and when its staff of federal employees were furloughed during the 43-day government shutdown.

As of 2023, Miami-Dade had the highest violent crime rate compared to other counties within the state.

Brother Lyle Muhammad founded the Circle of Brotherhood in 2012. He said he believes his group caught the attention of the Alliance for Safety and Justice based on its track record of reducing violence in Miami, and his work in Newark along with Sherrills. 

“The work that we’ve done locally here with gun violence, has been unparalleled,” Muhammad said proudly.

Similar to other mostly Black cities across the country, Miami has seen a drop in homicides — 39% — and there has been a reduction in other violent crimes, like rape, robbery, and aggravated assault, Axios reported in August. Liberty City, once labelled the most dangerous ZIP code in Miami-Dade County, saw a drop in homicides from 31 in 2020 to five in 2024.

“We’re one of the leaders in this work nationally, so we actually have a responsibility to help organizations scale up and to train, and so we’re playing our role here locally,” said Muhammad.

He intends to pass along resources to the 11 other community groups stationed, alongside his, inside the former site of Floral Heights Elementary School that closed in 2004.

“It’s never just been about us,” he said. “A lot of people come to this work because it’s heart work, and sometimes we don’t know how to turn the heart work into professional business operations.”

Although Brown didn’t receive direct funding from the Alliance for Safety and Justice’s Scaling Safety initiative, she attended a few informational sessions. There, she learned how at least two Jackson-based anti-violence groups would benefit from the partnership. Months later, while continuing the work and maintaining the title of her former director role without a government salary or benefits, a Scaling Safety representative who heard she was paying out-of-pocket to create customized gunshot-wound kits reached out to donate extra supplies. 

Brown said she is deeply grateful for the support — a task her husband, family, friends, and neighbors don’t seem to mind pitching in for. 

Since September 2014, nearly 2,000 people have been shot or killed in Jackson as a result of gun violence, according to the Gun Violence Archive, a database of public reports of shootings from sources including news reports and city crime reports. 

“I don’t just do violence prevention. I feed people. I deal with food insecurities,” Brown said. 

As distributions of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits remain uncertain, one of Brown’s immediate plans this November is to turn empty plots of land she and her husband own into a community garden.

“I’m gonna get ready to start growing cabbage and collard greens,” Brown said, lifting her chin. “Yep, I’m going to go into overdraft from going to buy some wood because I want to do it. I’m not gonna wait on nobody to give me nothing. It’ll work out in the wash.”