A ‘Game-Changing’ Gift for Gun Violence Prevention

Share

Link copied!

Just in time for Gun Violence Prevention Month, the Arthur M. Blank Family Family Foundation made a transformative, $25 million investment in the Fund for a Safer Future, the country’s only donor collaborative with a singular focus on the prevention of firearm violence.

The $25 million gift from the Blank Foundation will allow the fund to significantly expand it work, which includes support for violence and suicide prevention organizations and research institutions; it will also support FSF’s efforts to raise awareness of and build capacity around the issue — in the philanthrosphere and beyond.

The gift from the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation (AMBFF) was in the works before President Donald Trump took office, but the timing is fortuitous since — Gun Violence Prevention Month or not — the administration has slashed millions of dollars in support for community violence intervention programs, despite their proven effectiveness. Trump has also undermined efforts to limit firearms, while unwinding Biden-era efforts to strengthen enforcement by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. And in a gesture almost too obviously on the nose, the administration removed “Faces of Gun Violence,” a wall of photos displayed at ATF headquarters to memorialize firearm victims.

David Brotherton, the vice chair of the Fund for a Safer Future and program officer for the Roots & Wings Foundation’s gun violence prevention portfolio, underscored the powerful impact the AMBFF grant will have on the fund. “It’s a scale-jumping, transformational-level investment. It’s game-changing,” he said. “This grant commitment literally doubles the size of the organization in terms of annual budget, operating and grantmaking.” 

Brotherton also emphasized the significance of the timing: “I want to say, unequivocally, that we do not pretend for a second that philanthropy can backfill for federal government fiscal responsibilities to the social safety net. $25 million from the Blank Foundation is not going to fix that problem. But the reason why this grant arriving at this time is so important is because it signals that there is a need for philanthropy to step into this void and do what we can to patch holes and fill gaps, while so many communities are directly threatened.”

A public health crisis and a founder’s priorities 

The Fund for a Safer Future was originally conceived by the leaders of the Joyce Foundation in the wake of the shooting of Rep. Gabby Giffords of Arizona in 2011. The fund was created collaboratively by a group of five funders that pooled $1 million. Today, its 30-plus members include foundations with a broad focus, like the Joyce Foundation and Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies, as well as the Annie E. Casey Foundation, which prioritizes children, youth and families. Members also include nonprofits like the Jed Foundation, which promotes youth mental health, and Everytown For Gun Safety. FSF has made more than $25 million in grants since it was created, and leveraged $300 million more in aligned grantmaking from members. 

The Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation, which was built on the fortune of the Home Depot cofounder, supports an impressive array of causes, including rural America, environmental protection, mental health, and efforts to strengthen democracy and humanitarian aid. The foundation also supports initiatives in Atlanta and Montana, both regions that Arthur Blank calls home (see my colleague Ade Adeniji’s 2024 profile of the foundation).

AMBFF was a past member of the Fund for a Safer Future and so was already familiar with its work, according to Margaret Connelly, the foundation’s managing director of founder initiatives, who said a confluence of factors spurred AMBFF’s recent commitment.  

“In the summer of 2024, then Surgeon General Vivek Murthy came out with his report about gun violence as a public health crisis,” Connelly said. “We know that guns are the number one cause of death for children and teens. So it was a perfect storm of information that led us to think about how we could elevate our grantmaking and be strategic in how we were investing.” 

Arthur Blank’s own priorities also played a role. “The fact that gun violence is the leading cause of death for young people — Arthur often says that young people are a third of our population and 100% of our future,” Connelly said. “He feels real urgency about gun violence as a public health crisis. He also thinks about it from a community perspective: How do we build strong, thriving communities and make sure we’re addressing the things that limit that? We know that the Fund for a Safer Future does really good work. It seemed like the perfect place for us to invest on this issue.”

Fund for a Safer Future

AMBFF had several priorities that align with work the fund is already doing, including community and hospital violence intervention programs, suicide prevention, research, narrative change and fieldbuilding — all through the lens of prevention. “The fund’s focus on prevention and the fact that their work is data driven —  they provide almost a turnkey opportunity for us to to invest, because they have been working in this space for so long,” Connelly said. 

Fund for a Safer Future supports an array of community violence intervention programs; it also backs the Hospital Alliance for Violence Intervention, which aims to interrupt the cycle of harm with immediate support for victims arriving at the hospital for treatment. 

To drive narrative change on the issue, FSF funds The Trace, which reports on gun violence and tracks information and statistics through its data hub. FSF also supports organizations like Project Unloaded, which describes itself as a “culture change organization” that aims to educate young people about firearms. 

“Project Unloaded has spent years trying to understand what was happening in social media,” said FSF Chair Tim Daly, who is a senior advisor at the Joyce Foundation. “It has been doing the back-end research and developing campaigns and engagement with young people to have conversations, to give them space to better understand the risks associated with gun ownership and possession.” 

From its inception, FSF has supported research on the issue, and it has intentionally focused on creating a more diverse base of researchers. The fund was an early supporter of the Black & Brown Collective, which explores community solutions to gun violence. In its latest Request for Proposals, FSF encouraged early-career applicants, reserving a certain amount of funds for students less than 10 years from receiving a degree. Daly pointed out that this is especially important now, given the Trump administration’s many cuts to university research. 

Along with eliminating funding for ​community violence prevention, the Trump administration has slashed staff responsible for research into gun violence prevention at the CDC, and many observers anticipate more cuts to related research. “As you may remember, for a long time, the federal government was prohibited from investing in research on gun violence,” Daly said. “That changed a couple years ago, and the government started investing roughly $25 million a year. The people doing that research now are expecting that work to be cut at any moment.” 

Increasing awareness of suicide and suicide prevention is another FSF priority, and Brotherton believes it could be a bridge to consensus on a highly polarizing issue. In fact, suicide accounts for two-thirds of annual gun deaths.

“Historically, we haven’t talked about those two-thirds; we’ve focused on the one-third of gun deaths which are homicide or accidental,” he said. “But it seems obvious that if you’re talking about the totality of the problem, you’ve got to talk about the elephant in the room, which is the fact that people are taking their own lives with guns. We have historically lacked the language and the trust to engage gun-owning communities and rural spaces where gun ownership is high, but we are learning that there is bridge building that can happen. There is interest in solutions around safe storage and access to lethal means — all the things that social and public health science tells us can make a difference. I think the Fund for a Safer Future — particularly now, with the support of the Blank Foundation — is in a position to help drive some of those conversations.”

An example of the impact of Trump cuts on one FSF grantee

The National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform (NICJR) recently felt the bite  of the DOGE chainsaw. The organization, an FSF grantee, promotes community-based violence intervention efforts around the country. 

Research indicates that community violence prevention efforts have had a significant role in a drop in violence in recent years. “To cut significant funding for that work has a huge risk of increasing violence in the country, and that speaks to just how — to be honest — asinine these cuts are,” said David Muhammad, NICJR’s executive director. 

The Trump administration cut four NICJR grants totalling $5.5 million. The organization has appealed the cuts and is waiting to hear back. And in late May, five nonprofits filed a class action suit against the Trump administration “to restore more than $820 million in federal grants for violence prevention and community safety programs,” according to The Trace. 

NICJR is a large enough organization that it will survive, Muhammad said, but he has had to tighten the budget and eliminate some support for partner organizations. He worries about the many small organizations around the country working to prevent violence.

He pointed to Operation Good, a Jackson, Mississippi-based NICJR grantee that recently lost funding. The Trump administration terminated a two-year, $250,000 grant that comprised more than 20% of Operation Good’s budget; the organization had received $90,000 of the funds before the grant was cancelled. Operation Good was planning to use much of that funding to support a summer program that was a refuge for local youth. “That was the best thing we had going for violence reduction,” Frederick Womack, who cofounded Operation Good, told the The Guardian. “Kids are out of school, and coming to our program was their only food source. It helped us try to prevent robbing, stealing and killing.”

The Blank Foundation’s transformational gift

When the Fund for a Safer Future was launched in 2011, the collaborative included five donors and about a million dollars in pooled funds. “Fast forward to today: We are 35 member donors — most institutional, a couple of individual, high-network folks — and with the Blank investment, we are now about a $10 million a year enterprise,” said Brotherton.

That number is even higher if you include the aligned dollars member organizations spend on their own. As FSF Chair Daly pointed out in a 2021 Inside Philanthropy guest post, “Ultimately, the power of FSF and other funder collaboratives lies in helping funders magnify their impact, creating a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.”

The AMBFF gift will make that whole even greater. Brotherton spelled out what a large commitment like AMBFF’s represents in terms of dollars out the door. “It means we can make twice as many grants per year, or we can make bigger grants to known and trusted partners,” he said. “For example, we were planning grants focused on firearm suicide in 2024 and I think we budgeted $250,000. That was emblematic of how FSF has historically made most of its grants: five one-year, $50,000 grants. Now that suicide prevention budget is tripled, so we’re going to have $750,000 to work with. We haven’t allocated these dollars yet but it’s likely that we’re going to make six-figure grants to some organizations, and that we’re going to make multi-year commitments.”