1 week Ago By John Ramos
Last week, across the country, nonprofits doing work for the Department of Justice got news that was bad, but not totally unexpected. The federal grants they were operating under were summarily cancelled by the Trump administration, and that included two organizations operating in Oakland. "Yeah, so we got word about losing our federal funding last Tuesday," said Dr.
Joe Griffin. "We lost a two million dollar grant, over three years, that really supports one of our programs that we're most known for, which is Caught in the Crossfire." Dr.
Griffin is Executive Director of a group called Youth Alive, a violence reduction initiative focused on young people in East and West Oakland. The Caught in the Crossfire program sends trained counselors to the actual hospital rooms of people injured in violent confrontations, both to ease the trauma, but also to try to calm a situation that could lead to retaliation on the streets. "And that's the hardest part.
..is, you know, can we still be there?" he said.
"The folks who work here at Youth Alive lead with passion, and they lead with love for a community that they serve, but they're also from. And so, to have this promise broken? I'm going to do everything I can to support my team. And my team's going to do everything they can to be there.
But we needed our federal government to be there as well. And right now, they're not." Dr.
Griffin said the three-year grant that was cancelled paid for five employees, as well as offering assistance to at-risk victims of violence for things like housing, job placement or help getting back into school. He said he doesn't know how the loss of the program will affect the streets but intends to find the money to keep his workers, if possible. They haven't been as lucky across town at Impact Justice.
"In total, we had to lay off 31 people," said Executive Director Alex Busansky. He created Impact Justice to try to prevent incarceration and help people during and after their release from jail. Following the DOJ order, the organization was forced to shut down its National Housing Incubator, helping others generate housing for people being released from custody.
. "Devastating. I mean, if you follow the news, you knew that something like this was coming," said Busansky.
"I think so many people are surprised by the speed and the extent of what has happened, but I can't say that the DIRECTION of what has happened came as a surprise." But Impact Justice is also the lead agency coordinating the bipartisan Prison Rape Elimination Act, approved by Congress and signed by George W. Bush in 2006.
The program sent monitors and trainers into jails and prisons across America at a cost of about 4.5 million dollars..
.but that ended last week. "And like so many of us who had our grants cut, these aren't speculative," Busansky said.
"It's not that Congress or the Department of Justice said, 'next year we're not going to issue an RFP (Request For Proposal) in this area, next year we're changing our focus of what we want to do'...
they literally pulled the projects out from under the feet of the people who were doing the work." There was no real explanation of WHY various grants were cancelled, just that they didn't align with the current direction of the government..
.something that Dr. Griffin found particularly frustrating.
"When these grants go out, they are an initiative that originates IN THE GOVERNMENT!" he said. "They say this is the goal that we have, as a government. It felt unreal to get that letter.
I've never seen anything like it. Right now, this work is a test in daily resilience. This is a test of, what can we do to keep showing up for our community?" In all, the Department of Justice terminated 365 grants to organizations across the country, totaling roughly $811 million.
And they likely won't be the last. More letters are expected to come from every corner of the federal government, all with the idea that the spending is wasteful..
.even if it was the government's idea in the first place..
