In 2022, the City of San Diego received a $3.65 million grant from the State of California to launch the Peacemaker Project. The heart of the project is the work of four community-based organizations,* who provide, “violence prevention and intervention services that are grounded in trauma-informed care and cultural competence and aligned with restorative justice principles.”
The Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice (IPJ) is proud to serve as the evaluation partner on the project. In this role, the Institute has been working with the partners since the start of the project to support their data collection efforts. After the project is completed in late-2025, will write a comprehensive evaluation report to assess the impact of the project to identify lessons to inform future programming.
In April, the community partners and I presented on the Peacemaker’s project progress to Mayor Todd Gloria at City Hall. The hour-long meeting delved into detail on the services the partners are providing to prevent violence at the community level, including mentoring, job training, and mental health services. The project’s efforts to de-escalate conflict through initiating a rapid, community-based response to violent incidents were also discussed.
My role at the meeting was to present interim data on the project collected by the partners. Highlights included:
- The project has served 450 individuals, well over the 300 that were originally promised.
- Of the 171 individuals who are no longer receiving services, 85% have exited the program successfully.
- Top impacts on program participants recorded by the participants include reduced criminal behaviors while enrolled, reduced number of violent incidents while enrolled, and improved academic status.
Kroc IPJ Executive Director Andrew Blum and the other Peacemaker Project partners met with San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria to present their progress in the first two years of the City of San Diego's Peacemaker Project.
We were also able to discuss with Mayor Gloria the broader situation regarding violence in San Diego. In particular, I shared that based on recently released 2024 data, San Diego remains one of the safest, if not the safest, city of its size in the United States. Pastor Jesus Sandoval, the Executive Director of the City’s Gang Prevention and Intervention Commission noted at the meeting that everyone working on the issue of community violence in San Diego should be particularly proud of this given that San Diego is sandwiched between Tijuana and Los Angeles, two cities where rates of violence are much higher.
As I argued recently in the San Diego Union Tribune, community violence prevention works and has enormous payoffs. The reduction in homicides in San Diego, 38% since 2020, represents an enormous reduction in human suffering. A single homicide upends the lives of dozens of individuals in a community and can negatively impact whole neighborhoods. Beyond the human cost, it is estimated that every homicide costs cities $1 million to $2 million.
A longer-term goal of Pastor Sandoval and the Peacemaker Project partners is to secure dedicated funding for this crucial community violence prevention work in the City of San Diego budget. Given the City’s current budget crisis, it was clear from the meeting that this won’t be happening in the very near term. However, the meeting with the Mayor was one step toward the longer-term goal of establishing community violence prevention as a basic function of city government, just like garbage collection, education, or policing. The Kroc Institute of Peace and Justice, through its work assessing the impact of the Peacemaker Project, is proud to be contributing to this longer-term goal.
*The four organizations are: Open Heart Leaders, Union of Pan Asian Communities, Core 6, and Community Wraparound.
