Building Community Safety in Louisiana

Equal Justice USA (EJUSA) proposes to implement Building Community Safety in Louisiana project. The purpose of this project is to foster community safety in Louisianian jurisdictions experiencing high rates of violence by providing community-based organizations (CBOs) focused on violence prevention, intervention, and healing with the funding, resources, people power, capacity building support, and TTA needed to increase CBOs’ capacity to continue lifesaving programming. Project activities include codesigning a request for proposals (RFP) with OJP, dispersing maximum subaward funding ($250,000) to five Louisiana-based CBOs, providing selected subrecipients with the resources and trainings needed to bolster their capacity, and completing a final report that will summarize the activities and outcomes of CBOs’ violence reduction strategies. Capacity building activities will include conducting comprehensive needs assessments with each subrecipient; creating organizational development plans; one-on-one coaching from both grassroots capacity building and evaluation specialists; facilitating relevant meetings to address shared needs across CBOs; developing and maintaining a capacity building online library with pertinent resources, trainings, and toolkits; and deploying capacity building fellows to support CBOs as they achieve their fundraising and operational goals. Expected outcomes will be the increased organizational capacity and sustainability of CBOs, which will be determined by the level of engagement subrecipients will have with provided trainings and support, including meeting, training, and retreat attendance; pre- and post-training surveys and assessments; and utilization of capacity building resources. EJUSA is a Black-led, culturally specific organization focused on advancing racial equity and community-centered public safety strategies in Black and Brown communities and will prioritize providing subawards to CBOs that are Black- or Brown-led and/or focus on reducing violence in Black or Brown communities. Although subrecipients will be determined through the completion of the RFP process, EJUSA will give precedence to CBOs that employ evidence-informed violence prevention, intervention, and healing strategies in Louisianian communities with documented high or increasing rates of violent crime.