City of Cleveland Project Thrive proposes an expansion and enhancement of its community violence intervention and prevention initiatives.

The City of Cleveland is currently experiencing 30-year highs for violence crime, with the largest single year jump since crime state tracking began in the 1960s (2019/2020).  The homicide rate for Cleveland from 2018 to 2021 has risen from 33.6 to 48.5 per 100,000, with a peak of 52.7 in 2020, compared with a national rate increase from 5.1 to 6.9 over the same period.  To address this increase in violent crime, nine community-based organizations helmed by the City of Cleveland (and with the support of 30+ additional city, county, and community-based agencies) have joined together to propose – Cleveland Thrive. Cleveland Thrive aims to leverage national, state, and local resources (including human capital) to: (1) coordinate CVIs throughout the City, focusing on a footprint of high-violence neighborhoods (2 coordinator positions macro and micro to address both cross-system and providers reaching individuals with the highest need); (2) build a community-wide blueprint to address violence, ensuring that individual CVI programs/practitioners are able to meaningfully contribute to the overall violence-reduction goals of the City (expanding and enhancing previous community planning efforts); and, (3) provide funding for existing exemplar CVI efforts, as well as emergent/innovating programs responding to the blueprint (to provide immediate relief in communities experiencing violence as well as developing new initiatives to meet the community’s changing need). 

Cleveland Thrive is anchored in three strategies: (1) cross-Sector coordination and integration of public health models, allowing the initiative to cast a broad net in terms of both the populations recognized as needing services and the modalities of that service; (2) targeted violence intervention providing specific focus on providers working in the highest need groups; and, (3) strategic evidence-informed, data-driven interventions with three focal intervention methodologies, including: trauma-informed care, credible messenger, violence interruption/indicated interventions.

Cleveland Thrive addresses Priority Consideration 1A, 2, and 3.  Information addressing the initiatives diversity, equity and inclusion focus can be found on page 13 of the narrative, while data detailing the City of Cleveland’s high/increasing homicide rates can be found on pages 1 and 2 and the expansion of multidisciplinary efforts are highlighted in the  Capabilities and Competencies section (pages 13 and 14), in the Letters of Support and Planning Team Structure attachments.