Flint, MI — Karhlton F. Moore, director of the federal Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA), stood quietly as he listened to Cory Moore speak of his work, each man’s profile reflected in the many mirrors of MVP Cuts on Flint’s east side.
The barbershop serves both as the latter Moore’s place of business and program center for the Urban Boy Scouts, an organization he started to help neighborhood boys learn life skills, go on outings and serve their community.
The former Moore and his Department of Justice colleagues were in Flint to talk about community violence intervention with residents and organizers leading solutions strategies for the city. MVP Cuts was one stop on a day-long tour.
The barbershop sits across from Midway Square Townhomes, formerly the Evergreen Regency apartment complex.
Just a month earlier, two people were injured in a shooting there, and about a month before that, a 26-year-old woman was shot and killed outside one of its apartments.
Still a month before that, in May 2023, a 28-year-old man was critically injured from multiple gunshot wounds. That came just a little under a year after the shooting death of another 29-year-old woman in the complex.
Cory Moore was born at Regency, he told the BJA director, just across the street.
“It wasn’t like this when I was young,” he said. “Sometimes I get emotional talking about it because it’s like there’s nothing I can do about it.”
Catching himself, the barber and mentor added: “But there is something I can try to do about it… I can keep these young brothers focused on the doing right thing, and keep them together and try to teach them how to get along with each other so that probably won’t keep on reoccurring… It’s gotta stop somewhere. I just want to make it stop here.”
The Urban Boy Scouts was one stop of many on Director Moore’s tour of Flint, the goal of which, said Seamus Bannon, program director for Flint’s Community-Based Violence Intervention and Prevention Initiative (CVIPI), was to give Moore and other visiting federal officials a sense of how gun violence has impacted the city and what the community is doing about it.
“We can’t allow this to be normal,” Moore said upon opening his speech at Berston. “I think people like me have an enormous responsibility, an enormous responsibility, to assist communities like Flint all across this country.”
Moore also visited with city and state officials at Flint City Hall and also met with community leaders at Hasselbring Senior Center, the Latinx Technology Center, Berston Field House and Applewood.
Flint receives federal funding for community violence intervention
Back in fall 2022, the BJA granted the city of Flint $1.5 million to help prevent violence in the community.
At the time, the city’s homicides were on a downward trend from the past year, but they were declining from near-record numbers.
A July 2020 report showed a 169% increase in non-fatal shootings and an 83.3% increase in fatal shootings from the year before; in 2021, fatal shootings were up 27% from 2021’s number, despite Flint Mayor Sheldon Neeley declaring a state of emergency due to gun violence in July of that year.
Upon announcing the BJA grant, Flint’s former chief resilience officer Lottie Ferguson said, “We have listened to what the community deems as important issues to them, and one of them is the reduction of crime. So we are being intentional and going after grant funds to ensure the safety of Flint residents.”
The grant language noted that the city would work with “a multidisciplinary team” including “mental health service providers, community based organizations, faith based organizations, law enforcement, victim advocates, service providers, hospital and other healthcare providers, researchers and community residents.”
Fortunately, Bannon told Flint Beat, the city already had such a group prior to receiving the BJA grant.
“It’s called the Violence Prevention Network, or VPN,” Bannon said, noting that he and Moses Bingham, Director of Special Projects and Initiatives at the Community Foundation of Greater Flint, connect with VPN members monthly as part of the grant process.
“We’ve been meeting and talking about needs assessments, learning about what each other do,” Bannon said. “The main theme throughout, for each of the entities, is capacity and resources is the major need.”
Bannon’s explanation was made clear during Moore’s visit to Berston Field House, as multiple members of the network rose to speak about their work with the BJA director and his colleagues, Cornelia Sigworth, also of the BJA, and Eddie Bocanegra of the Assistant Attorney General’s Office.
‘Let’s just change the narrative’
During Moore’s stop at Berston, Patrick McNeal, a VPN member, spoke passionately about the work of his organization.
He explained that the North Flint Neighborhood Action Council works with residents, neighborhood associations and block clubs to respond to the issues facing the city’s north side, such as safety, housing and education.
“What they try to do is they try to tell us that North Flint is a bad place to live,” McNeal said to a crowd of around 30 guests, including Moore. “North Flint ain’t bad, it’s just a place. Right? What makes North Flint ‘bad’ is the lack of resources. So let’s just change the narrative.”
McNeal said it’s not that the city has “bad neighborhoods” but rather, it has “under-resourced neighborhoods.”
“And without the resources, poverty leaks in,” he said. “And when poverty leaks in, the rest of the social determinants take over. Give me some money, and I’ll show you how to change it.”
Jalil X, spokesperson for the Peacekeepers Global Initiative in Flint, built on McNeal’s words, noting that eradicating violence in the city cannot come from any single one of the organizations in the room, but all of them working together.
He said the majority of the violence he sees in Flint stems from misunderstandings and ineffective approaches to communication.
“Most conflicts that are happening in our community is from a lack of understanding between what one person said and one person did to another—the perception that a person had.”
Other VPN members, like Dr. Kenyotta Dotson, shared stories — both personal and of people they’d met or learned of through their violence intervention work.
“I just want to read something to you really quickly,” Dotson said, holding up a large image of a letter scrawled in crayon. “This says, ‘I know you are sad because your sister is now gone, but you don’t have to give up. Stand tall, have hope, peace, love and everything else. I know it is going to be hard some nights and some days, but I want you to know she is in a better place now. She’s flying. She has smiles, and she’s in heaven where there’s love at.’”
Dotson explained the picture was drawn by DonNesha Williams, when she was about 6 years old, for her Flint neighbor.
Williams herself was killed seven years later, at 13, the victim of a stray bullet in a drive-by shooting. She had been walking to her neighborhood market.
“So when we talk about the impact that violence has within community — when we talk about partners, individuals working together — it is vitally important,” Dotson said, adding that her organization, WOWOutreach, works to eliminate not just violence, but the “tolerance for violence.”
Moore listened as other members stood and shared their stories as well, from the lens of law enforcement to trauma and mental health service providers.
When he got up to speak, he repeated the themes he’d heard over the last hour as he talked about his own role.
“When I go on these visits… the thing that is always so amazing to me is that people who have gone through hell are so hopeful. They still are hopeful,” Moore said. “You know, we make investments. We have responsibilities at the Bureau of Justice Assistance to reduce violent crime, to create safe communities and to reform our criminal justice system. We have tools that we utilize to do that: investments, training and technical assistance engagement… But there are elements—there are elements to things that work that aren’t in our solicitations.”
Moore noted that one speaker had talked about “love” as a tool for better communication and understanding, and that he felt love was just as important as his bureau’s programming.
“I think that matters. Empathy, hope, humanity. You know, when you see people as yours… every loss of life is a tragedy… And it’s our responsibility to reduce tragedy,” he said.
What’s next
Flint’s community violence intervention (CVI) grant is closing in on the first of its three years of implementation.
Bannon, the city’s CVIPI program director, told Flint Beat that the city will be submitting the working group’s strategic plan for bureau approval in the coming month or so.
Once approved, the grant’s $1.5 million in funding can begin flowing into identified violence intervention solutions in years two to three of implementation.
But, Bannon stressed, the plan will remain a “working document,” and subject to change as needs are realized or feedback necessitates.
“So if we find out that something we had planned, some sort of intervention program or some sort of capacity building strategy, wasn’t working for us within the first six to seven months of year two, we could go back to the DOJ and update our plan to show that and maybe do something different,” he said.
But for some doing Flint’s community violence intervention work, there’s concern over not thinking longer-term about funding.
During Moore’s stop at Berston, Sandra Etherly-Johnson, executive director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion & Community Relations for the Flint & Genesee Group, said she wasn’t focused on the immediate funding so much as how to sustain it — and therefore the work it will help Flint accomplish — once it’s depleted.
In example, Etherly-Johnson noted that she’d been part of another grant process for Flint’s north side roughly eight years ago.
Since then, she said, she’s had to watch work done with that money fade away with the depletion of funding.
“We invested in economic development and job training,” she told Moore. “We invested in community centers where they created programming to help people get jobs and driver’s licenses… and healthcare. All to fall by the wayside due to lack of continuous support.”
She asked the BJA director and his team how they would help ensure that such a cycle didn’t repeat itself when it came to community violence intervention.
Moore responded that he agreed the biggest challenge with grants is that they are “temporary” and “always will be.”
He said while he thinks his office has gotten better at “encouraging collaboration,” that “still remains very much a local responsibility on developing those relationships in the strategic plan.”
He also named a few resources BJA offers to help build those strategic plans, for pursuing its grants or for pursuing others.
Bocanegra noted that some states have also put American Rescue Plan Act funding toward sustaining CVI work, and Sigworth added that it’s important to identify those in the VPN group or community who qualify for grants that may otherwise go unclaimed.
“For example, we have a ton of funding that’s for school-based violence intervention work,” she said. “[That] could easily partner with what your project is doing, right? But it needs to be a school that applies. So just making sure that when you’re thinking about these funding opportunities, who are the different partners that you have and could one of those partners go after funding?”
In all, Moore said his major takeaway from his Flint visit is that the city “feels like a community” with a matching, community-wide approach to its issues.
“I feel like I’m in a community where people are really focused on what they can do to make their community better,” he said. “Obviously, there’s some resource challenges here… but in terms of people — having people who are willing to work together and aware of the problems — they are really focused on the solution.”
The second year of Flint’s community violence intervention grant implementation begins in October 2023.
According to the Flint Police Department’s most recent crime comparison report, murders and non-negligent homicides are down 33.33% as compared to July 23 of last year. Part I violent crimes are up 23.33% in the same time period.
Editors Note: Flint Beat’s founder and publisher, Jiquanda Johnson, is a member of Flint’s Violence Prevention Network.