By Kathy Chouteau
Richmond City Council allocated a $35,000 grant last week from Chevron to help fund the violence prevention efforts of the city’s Office of Neighborhood Safety (ONS). It marks the third grant from the company over three years totaling $105,000. Chevron plans to continue its support of the program in 2025.
Richmond Councilmember Soheila Bana said she was proud to support the grant “because ONS has been doing an excellent job serving our community.”
“Their work goes beyond gun violence reduction—they address many of the root causes of violence and provide essential support through programs like CCRP (Community Crisis Response Program), which helps meet the basic needs of our community members,” Councilmember Bana said.
Pioneered by Founder DeVone Boggan in Richmond in October 2007, ONS is now a national model with versions adopted in cities nationwide. The program is among the tools local leaders credit with helping to reduce the city’s homicide total to eight in 2023, the lowest annual total since 1971.
The program employs two key strategies: Street Outreach and Operation Peacemaker Fellowship, ONS Deputy Director Sam Vaughn told us in our profile of the program last year. Street Outreach sends ONS into the community to connect with those who are at a high risk for gun violence and encouraging them to tap into life altering resources and organizations.
The Operation Peacemaker Fellowship strategy takes people at the center of—and most impacted by—gun violence and walks them through an 18-month process. The goal during this time is teach participants to learn how to deal with life without engaging in violence.
Data shows the program’s impact. Of 165 fellows served in Richmond in 2023 (averaging 17 years old), 100 percent were reportedly alive, while 98 percent had no new gun injuries. Another 93 percent were not arrested. Over the course of 10,461 engagements and more than 13,000 hours, the fellows made 5,243 street outreaches and mediated 132 conflicts that could have escalated into gun violence, according to ONS and the Center for Global Healthy Cities at U.C. Berkeley.
In all, $7.5 to $20 million is estimated to have been saved due to gun violence interruptions, according to cost estimates from the National Institute of Criminal Justice Reform.
Of ONS fellows, 73 percent received life coaching, 74 percent attended life skills classes and 45 percent created a LifeMAP to get a leg up on life. These personal successes have occurred amid fellows’ adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), such as being on food stamps, witnessing domestic violence and having a household member addicted (50 percent of fellows); having a parent incarcerated (46 percent); and witnessing a homicide (45 percent). Find more ONS stats here.
