CVI is Mental Health Work: Why Portland Must Fund What Actually Works
I am sharing a critical concern from my own point of view regarding the current trajectory of Community Violence Intervention (CVI) work in Portland and Gresham, and to outline the opportunity before us to strengthen public safety through precision, integrity, and investment on the frontline.
The Crisis We Faced
Community Violence Intervention has become a central component of public safety efforts across both cities as we have confronted historic levels of gun violence. The following numbers show that Portland experienced 916 shootings in 2020, 1,315 in 2021, and 1,306 in 2022, before declining to 803 shootings in 2023. Homicides followed a similar pattern, rising from 54 in 2020 to a record 95 in 2022, then falling to 73 in 2023.
Gresham itself experienced its own surge, with homicides rising from 6 in 2020 to 16 in 2021, then stabilizing at 10 in 2022, 11 in 2023, and 6 in 2024.
The newest available 2025 data shows that Portland recorded 17 homicides through June 2025, compared to 35 during the same period in 2024, representing a 51 percent decline, the steepest drop among major U.S. cities. This decline aligns with the continued expansion of CVI strategies and strengthened partnerships across the city. These reductions demonstrate what happens when CVI is funded, supported, and allowed to operate with precision. Shootings and homicides fall.
Our Work on the Frontline
Our organization, Nurture Outreach, has been part of this shift. Our work focuses on individuals at the center of retaliatory gun violence, those whose actions, histories, and social positioning place them at the highest risk of shooting or being shot. This work is grounded in lived experience, credible relationships, and real time intelligence. It cannot be replicated by organizations without connections to the communities most affected.
The Uncomfortable Truth: CVI is Mental Health Work
Portland and Gresham, and cities throughout the country, must confront an uncomfortable truth. That is, CVI is mental health work, even though it is rarely recognized or funded as such. Every credible messenger in this work is doing trauma work, crisis stabilization, emotional regulation, grief support, and cognitive reframing, often in the middle of the night, in the middle of conflict, or in the immediate aftermath of violence.
This is not traditional clinical therapy, but it is undeniably therapeutic. It is healing work. It is stabilization work. It is behavioral intervention work. And it is happening every day without the mental health funding streams that other providers receive.
“CVI is mental health work, even though it is rarely recognized or funded as such.”
If Portland and Gresham want to continue reducing shootings, they must invest in the mental health infrastructure that CVI practitioners already provide. That means prioritizing:
Paid employment, because stability is therapeutic.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), because thought patterns drive behavior.
Healing centered spaces, because trauma fuels retaliation.
Workforce pathways, because purpose reduces risk.
Culturally grounded care, because trust determines engagement.
Program Spotlight: The THREAT Model
Nurture Outreach’s THREAT (The High Risk Employment and Therapy) model, pairing 30 hours of paid employment with 10 hours of trauma informed CBT each week, is not an enhancement. It is the intervention needed in this work. It is the mental health and behavioral health infrastructure that Portland’s highest risk individuals will actually use, trust, and benefit from.
The Funding Crisis: Dilution and Misallocation
Yet, despite the proven impact of CVI, funding decisions in recent years have often undermined the work, including in Portland and Gresham. For example:
Reentry and workforce organizations received ARPA-funded CVI allocations, even though their clients were not involved in gun violence. Meanwhile, frontline teams, those with years of relationships, real-time intelligence, and deep credibility, were significantly underfunded, receiving only a fraction of the resources required to engage the individuals at the center of retaliatory violence. Because these frontline practitioners lacked political proximity or large administrative infrastructures, they were resourced far below the level their impact demanded. As a result, dozens of individuals driving retaliatory shootings remained unengaged.
Large nonprofits with strong grant-writing teams received CVI dollars despite having no connection to the individuals driving shootings.
Organizations added "street outreach" to their websites to qualify for funding, even though their staff lacked neighborhood credibility.
Policy and advocacy groups with no frontline experience were awarded major CVI contracts, rebranding themselves as "technical assistance providers" despite never having engaged a firearm offender.
Meanwhile, the individuals most responsible for shootings, the ones CVI is designed to reach, were left without meaningful intervention.
A Call for Strategic Investment
I've come to stand on the view that cities that are serious about reducing retaliatory gun violence must invest differently. They must fund fewer organizations at levels that create the conditions for delivering measurable results. In Portland and Gresham, this means allocating more resources to fewer organizations, specifically those with trusted CVI experience and a demonstrated history of impact.
If CVI continues to expand without clarity, focus, and discipline, the power of CVI will be impaired, and the field will forfeit its credibility.
This is not just a matter of integrity. It is a matter of impact.
Precision Over Proximity
CVI loses effectiveness when proximity replaces probability, when "highest risk" is defined by environment instead of behavior, and when eligibility is driven by demographics rather than real-time gun violence dynamics.
Nurture Outreach's model reflects the precision required to reduce shootings. It identifies three core profiles at the center of retaliatory gun violence:
The Habitual Offender, a known shooter whose actions demonstrate a willingness to use firearms to resolve conflict.
The Active Offender, an individual directly connected to a recent shooting, under immediate pressure to retaliate.
The Known Catalyst, a person who reliably escalates conflict, turning disputes into shootings.
CVI work is not random. It is predictive and retaliatory gun violence. In Portland and Gresham, this is not a mystery to those who live and labor in its midst. We know the risk. We can identify those at the center of it. And we can intervene, but only if we maintain precision and purpose.
CVI's Unique Role in the Ecosystem
CVI sits at the center of a larger ecosystem: victim services, youth development, healing-centered providers, re-entry supports, workforce opportunities, community organizing, and policy advocacy. All these elements matter. All contribute to the conditions that make nonviolence possible.
But none of them can replace CVI's unique responsibility: to directly engage those most likely to shoot or be shot, disrupt cycles of retaliation in real time, and shepherd individuals at the center of gun violence toward safety, stability, and transformation.
The Path Forward
CVI must become a permanent fixture in regional public safety infrastructure, embedded in city budgets, recognized as essential, and held to high professional standards. And both cities must prioritize funding for models that pair paid employment with cognitive behavioral therapy, because these are the interventions that stabilize lives, reduce trauma, and interrupt violence at its roots.
If the original purpose of CVI is not reclaimed now, Portland and Gresham risk losing a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reverse their gun violence trajectories.
CVI fulfills its original promise: to make retaliatory gun violence rare and non-recurring by reaching the people who are most tightly bound to it.
Take Action
If you are a policymaker, funder, or community partner who wants to support proven Community Violence Intervention strategies in Portland and Gresham, we invite you to connect with Nurture Outreach. Together, we can invest in what actually works.