In Brief:
- Former President Joe Biden encouraged jurisdictions to use some of their American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funding for violence intervention — and many did.
- Helped by this funding, local governments plagued by high rates of gun violence, like Baltimore, Md., and Mecklenburg County, N.C., have been showing success in reducing incidents.
- Jurisdictions were well aware ARPA money would run out — as it’s due to do in 2026. While some initiatives may scale down or be put on pause until new funding is found, leaders in Baltimore and Mecklenburg say they’ve prepared to sustain the core work.
From 2015-2020, homicides and gun-related assaults almost doubled in North Carolina’s Mecklenburg County. The county’s biggest city, Charlotte, had the 10th highest rate of fatal shootings among cities of its size from 2018-2022.
It’s no wonder the county opted to make violent crime a top priority. In 2019, it declared gun violence a public health issue and, a year later, launched an Office of Violence Prevention. The goal was to not just catch perpetrators after the fact but to stop violence before it happened.
In 2021, Congress passed the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), providing state and local governments with funds to help recover from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. In Mecklenburg, the ARPA poured $3 million into the violence prevention effort, powering up new initiatives. The work has been promising, with gun violence in Mecklenburg dropping 35 percent year over year in 2023 — outstripping the county’s goal to decrease gun violence 10 percent in five years.
Baltimore, too, used ARPA money to help it confront serious struggles with violence.
In 2021, Baltimore marked the third highest rate of gun deaths among cities of its size. The following year, Baltimore was the site of 41 percent of all gun homicides in Maryland, despite the city comprising just 9 percent of the state population.
But the city is turning the page. Just five months into 2025, homicides are already down 23 percent year over year and non-fatal shootings by nearly as much, all this following on top of two years of falling violent crime rates, says Stefanie Mavronis, director of the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement (MONSE). ARPA funding helped the city create Mavronis’ agency, paying for many of its employees and enabling the office to give grants and contracts to organizations that provide important violence reduction services.
But ARPA funding was never going to last — and now it’s running out. All money had to be committed by the end of 2024 and spent by the end of next year.
“ARPA was really a game changer for the community violence intervention and prevention field,” says Nick Wilson, senior director for gun violence prevention at nonprofit policy institute the Center for American Progress. “ARPA was really a chance for cities to really experiment and scale up existing programs, and especially for a lot of places, we saw new programs being started.”
As the clock ticks down on the ARPA, local governments have been assessing what efforts worked, and how to keep them going.
Mecklenburg County
In Mecklenburg, ARPA funding went to a variety of initiatives, ranging from a youth peace summit to marketing campaigns raising awareness about the county’s gun lock distribution program, mental health services, youth services and more, says Dr. Raynard Washington, health director for Mecklenburg County. The county Office of Violence Prevention is part of the county Public Health department, and works to reduce violence through efforts to disrupt it and head it off. That includes youth development and mentoring programs, support services for victims after a violent incident, re-entry programs and more.
The funds also helped the county develop a curriculum for its Peacekeepers Academy, which teaches community-based organizations about evidence-based violence prevention techniques and about managing small nonprofits.
“We tried to plan to use the ARPA resources in a way that would help us build capacity and foundation, but [where] we wouldn't run into an aggressive [fiscal] cliff when those funds were no longer available to us,” Washington says.
Some initiatives were one-off efforts and so won’t be impacted by the end of the ARPA. For example, ARPA funded a community meeting where stakeholders discussed how to better prevent violence in a tricky area of the county: the I-85/Sugar Creek corridor, where the I-85 highway and Sugar Creek Road intersect. The area is marked by aging hotels, used in some cases for extended stays and in other cases for criminal activities. High rates of homelessness, high rates of crimes like prostitution and trafficking and the lack of a traditional organized community or neighborhood structure in that area meant the usual approaches wouldn’t work.
One-time ARPA funding also helped Mecklenburg create a report about the cost of gun violence in the county and develop a monitoring system to assess the impact of violence reduction efforts.
Still, “there are some things we have been able to do that have recurring costs,” Washington says, and the county will have to find other ways to sustain them or else scale them down. His team isn’t just bracing for the end of ARPA dollars for violence prevention work — it’s anticipating further belt tightening from the local government as it loses ARPA funding for other kinds of initiatives.
When the ARPA ends, the county will not be able to afford to broadly distribute the marketing materials it made to advertise its gun lock distribution program and other offerings. It may have to reduce use of the ads or seek free places to post them, Washington says. It may also have to stop bringing in outside speakers to Peacekeeper Academies. And the county will need to find other ways to keep holding Peace Builder summits with youth.
But, Washington says, many violence intervention efforts will persist, with the county carefully drawing on local resources to sustain it.
Baltimore and Beyond
About 400 miles north, ARPA funds have also been buoying gun violence prevention efforts in Baltimore.
Over the past few years, the city has been revamping its approach to violent crime. It created the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement in December 2020, and launched the city’s first multiyear, comprehensive violence reduction strategy in January 2022, both of which signaled a major shift in thinking. Public safety was no longer just the realm of law enforcement and prosecutors responding after an incident — the work now also included collaborations with community-based partners on interceding to prevent violence before it happens.
And the ARPA played a big role.
“ARPA funding was very significant to the office that I have the honor of leading today,” MONSE Director Marvonis says. “We used ARPA funding essentially to stand up a brand-new city agency.”
The ARPA funded 20 full-time employees for MONSE. While the agency ultimately discontinued four of those roles, the remaining 16 ARPA-funded positions comprise nearly 40 percent of MONSE’s total staffing today. The office is responsible for implementing the city’s Comprehensive Violence Prevention Plan, which includes working with partners and directly providing supports intended to reduce violence, such as re-entry services to ease incarcerated people’s return to society and support services for victims of crime. The office also invests in community-based organizations working in the violence reduction space. One effort includes helping expand hospital-based violence intervention programs, which connect victims of violent crimes with supportive services, something that can reduce victims’ likelihood of engaging in retaliatory violence.
With the ARPA’s end date looming, MONSE has prepared to sustain its staffing. Eleven positions will start being paid out of the city budget next fiscal year. The remaining five ARPA-supported roles have also shifted to alternate funding sources, like state grants and other federal grants.
ARPA funds also paid for MONSE to disburse several contracts and grants to organizations to provide services important to implementing the city’s multiyear violence reduction strategy. That includes violence prevention initiatives, like ones that provide conflict mediation, and services for survivors of violence and trauma.
As that money sunsets, Mavronis’ team is considering how to ease the transition.
“We’re not going to make as many grant awards moving forward. We don't have as many millions of dollars on an annual basis to move to organizations,” Mavronis says. Instead, the agency may write letters of support to help community-based organizations solicit other funding. Some organizations have secured funding from other city sources.
For some programs, MONSE is still actively seeking answers to the funding gap. The agency is working with the city and partners to consider how to sustain the hospital-based violence intervention program long term, for example, after the final ARPA investment ends.
Like Baltimore, many cities around the U.S. used ARPA funding for proofs of concept, hoping to demonstrate the value of initiatives and win them a recurring place in the city budget, says Wilson.
Regardless of the future of these programs, the track record is clear, he says. Gun violence spiked during COVID-19, then declined significantly.
“A lot of things contributed to that decline,” Wilson says. “But I think it's pretty clear that community violence intervention programs played an important part, and the cities that invested the most ARPA money in these programs saw the biggest declines in gun violence.”
The wind-down of the ARPA also comes as violence prevention is facing a new challenge: the Department of Justice’s recent termination of a slew of public safety grants, in many cases cutting off multiyear funding that recipients had been midway through spending. An estimated 554 organizations are affected nationwide, with grantees working in areas like violence prevention, victim advocacy, mental health and substance abuse treatment, re-entry services and research. The move also cut $5 million of funding that primarily grant awardees would have passed along to state, local and tribal law enforcement agencies to help them bring down violence in rural areas. Attorney General Pam Bondi said the cuts eliminated “wasteful grants.”
