Addressing the Root Causes of Violent Crime with the Elevation Grant Program

Why this investment?

With its focus on building thriving neighborhoods, the Elevation Grant Program evolved out of Indianapolis’s more than two decades long crime prevention efforts. In the early 2000s, the City launched a crime prevention program with federal Comprehensive Anti-Gang Initiative (CAGI) funds. After the CAGI program ended, the City continued funding a community grants program focused on lowering recidivism rates and providing re-entry services at a level of $2 to $5 million per year under multiple administrations.

When ARPA was announced, then-Director of the Office of Public Health and Safety for the City of Indianapolis (and later Deputy Mayor) Lauren Rodriguez, made a bold request to fund the community grant program to $15 million per year. To her surprise, the request was approved, and the program was packaged as a part of Indianapolis’ comprehensive ARPA-funded Anti-Violence Plan.

The ARPA investment coincided with The Indianapolis Foundation’s strengthened strategic focus on supporting grassroots organizations to address the root causes of violence. “Crime isn’t just not going to go away, but you're not going to police your way out of it and you're not going to grant your way out of it” Ross says. “We're going to have to figure out how to bring in more of the community that typically hasn't been involved.” 

With the shift in focus, The Indianapolis Foundation changed the name of the grant from the Violent Crime Reduction Grant Program to the Elevation Grant Program. “Elevation” epitomized the emphasis on uplifting the aspirations and assets of neighborhoods “for a purpose of hope and prosperity,” as Rodriguez describes, rather than reinscribing negative narratives about underinvested communities.

What is this investment?

The Elevation Grant Program provides year-long grants ranging from $20,000 to $250,000 to nonprofit organizations working to reduce violence and strengthen neighborhoods through evidence-based strategies and promising practices within five focus areas: 1) programs to create safe, thriving neighborhoods; 2) services for disengaged youth and young adults; 3) restoration and resilience through mental health and conflict resolution; 4) supports for justice-involved residents; and 5) crisis interventions. The Indianapolis Foundation defines crime prevention broadly as “any effort that seeks to reduce initial or chronic interaction with criminal and/or juvenile legal systems and increase the safety of Indianapolis residents and their neighborhoods.” This change has opened the door for organizations who may not have been considered under the crime prevention umbrella, previously.

The Indianapolis Foundation closed applications for their sixth and final grant cycle in June 2024. For each round of funding, The Foundation determined a set of priorities to address specific root causes of violent crime, whether it be through establishing more connected and engaged neighborhoods or providing educational and mental health supports. This emphasis flows from their theory of change, inspired by a comprehensive community safety measurement framework developed with communities impacted by crime and disinvestment. The framework focuses on the presence of elements such as economic security, public services, and community power, in addition to the absence of crime.

Grantees have included a range of organizations offering tailored programs for specific segments of the population, such as Keys2Work, which helps homeless and justice-involved individuals successfully transition into the workforce; Sea Scope, which is focusing on diversity in science and aquatics; and the George Washington HUB Club, which provides academic assistance, community involvement opportunities, and enriching activities for youth.

Centering equity in the program

Both The Indianapolis Foundation and the City’s Office of Public Health and Safety are committed to advancing racial equity through their work. The Foundation adopted an equity framework in 2019 that aims to address root causes, eliminate disparities, and address system-level reforms rather than one-off projects. The Foundation seeks to fund organizations that provide under-appreciated, marginalized populations with quality programming focused on outcomes and designed with the communities they seek to serve. In his first term, Mayor Hogsett re-envisioned how to address crime by forming a new office dedicated to addressing the root causes of crime and violence—The Office of Public Health and Safety (OPHS). His vision was to pour resources into areas that did not have dedicated investments previously to support a community-based approach to reducing violence.

As a part of their equity focus, both OPHS and The Foundation recognized the importance of investing in grassroots organizations already rooted in communities, defined as a resident-led entity operating under community values, shared power, and decision-making, and supported by an organizational budget of up to $250,000. Alicia Collins, senior consultant for the Elevation Grant Program, emphasized the intentional racial equity lens used from the beginning. “We had to ensure that we were getting BIPOC-led organizations, those who may not have the benefit of being in traditional leadership roles before, as other nonprofits or other grantees,” Collins says.

The team believes that investing in these organizations that are already doing positive work in Black and Brown neighborhoods can have reverberating impacts. “If you know how to manage a business, then you're also teaching the generations after you how to manage their money and manage their business and sustain something," Rodriguez says. Through the six rounds of the program, 24 percent of the organizations were grassroots and 37 percent had never received an award for their work in crime prevention.

In addition to providing funding, the Elevation Grant Program provides regular workshops, training, and 1:1 coaching to help organizations sustain themselves and grow. “We're calling it infrastructure development,” Ross says. “To name the fact that it's not that there's a deficit in the community or with these leaders, the deficit is in the fact that they have not been provided the resources to create the infrastructure that is necessary for them to sustain and build.” 

The biggest challenges for the program have related to the processes involved in using federal funds to quickly scale up the program. At the onset of the program, The Foundation had to make the case to the City to structure it as a traditional grant program with an upfront lump-sum payment versus a contract where the nonprofit organizations would pay for program costs and be reimbursed by the City, knowing this was crucial to reaching grassroots organizations. Reporting has also been challenging, given the program’s focus on small nonprofits new to using public funds. Despite these challenges, the team feels that their institutions are level-setting around processes and expectations, and that both organizations have built valuable new infrastructure to support the program.

Outcomes to date

The Elevation Grant Program awarded 237 grants to 125 organizations over six rounds of grantmaking. Over the first five rounds of grants, 80 percent of grantees were Black and Brown-led community organizations. This share declined to 60 percent for the sixth round of grantmaking, which had a stronger focus on the likely sustainability of grantees after the end of the grant period.

So far, the grant program has won its bet on grassroots organizations. Of the 186 grants made through the fifth round of grants, only seven have been canceled due to a lack of financial compliance, providing solid evidence that small organizations deeply rooted in marginalized communities can—and should be—included as formal, funded partners in community transformation efforts.

In addition to measuring program progress through grantee reporting on demographics and performance metrics, The Foundation has contracted with Indiana University’s Center for Research on Inclusion and Social Policy (CRISP) to evaluate the program, which will be complete at the end of 2025. 

Outcome data from the first two rounds of the program show that the Elevation Grant’s 81 grantees helped at least 36,990 people in communities of need. Of those helped by Elevation Grant programs, 73 percent identified as Black or African American and 16 percent identified as Latinx, while 49 percent also identified as female. In addition, 36 percent of those who received services in association with the program were between the ages of 12 and 19.

Youth involved with these programs reported feeling increased positive coping skills, an ability to build self-awareness and healthy relationships, the reduction of stress, confidence managing daily emotions, and overall positive attitude changes. To date, the program’s grantees have not experienced any deaths or gun violence among families or clients. Additionally, the programs focused on recidivism and reentry have successfully reduced the recidivism rate to 34 percent, compared to Marion County’s overall rate of 46 percent. 

The Foundation is charting these intermediate outcomes as well as noting the growing stability of newer, traditionally overlooked community organizations that have been able to leverage the additional funds to grow their budgets.

Toward transformative change

As the project nears the end of the ARPA funding, the City and The Indianapolis Foundation are considering the future of the Elevation Grant Program. The Indianapolis Foundation plans to adopt a new strategic plan. The Foundation’s Vice President of Grantmaking Andrew Black says the Elevation Grant Program will play a key role in The Foundation’s effort to promote health equity by addressing the root causes of violent crimes and recidivism. Meanwhile, Indianapolis has proposed to continue crime prevention funding in its 2025 budget proposals. Funding beyond 2025 will be determined based on the comprehensive evaluation of the program provided by The Indianapolis Foundation. The Indianapolis City-County Council is currently reviewing all 2025 budget recommendations.

The continuation of the Elevation Grant Program over the past few years has led to a stronger relationship between the City and The Indianapolis Foundation. The two sides have adopted a shared language on equity issues and have improved some of its bureaucratic processes to better aid The Foundation, ultimately developing a shared narrative around violence prevention. “My hope is that because we do so well in these things, that in 20 years we won't have as much crime because we made those initial investments that had not ever been done before,” Rodriguez says.