A Cleveland anti-violence initiative that intervenes after a resident is shot and taken to the hospital just received a lifeline after a year of funding challenges.
Hospital-based violence interrupters are community members trained in violence prevention who meet with families to try and discourage retaliation after a shooting and connect them with resources like counseling or housing assistance.
For years, the city’s two high-level trauma centers — MetroHealth and University Hospitals — boasted the presence of a violence interrupter in their emergency rooms.
But unstable funding made that difficult over the past year: University Hospitals lost its violence interrupter in March, and MetroHealth had to begin paying for the position out of an unexpected pot of funding.
A new $300,000 investment from local philanthropy Semi J. and Ruth W. Begun Foundation will pay for the positions for two years. The funding will support two positions at each hospital – one full-time and one part-time. Cleveland Peacemakers Alliance, a community-based violence intervention group, will employ the violence interrupters. The grant also hopes to help fund emergency housing and mental health care for victims of shootings.
The Academy of Medicine of Cleveland and Northern Ohio, which represents physicians in the region, sought out the donation. The group decided to make addressing gun violence as a public health crisis a central focus of its work in 2024. After hearing about federal cuts to violence intervention work last year, it wanted to find a way to support the work.
“We said, ‘Hey, what we really want to do is get some stable funding that for at least two years, we can prove that these hospital violence interrupters are making a difference,’” said Jen Johns, executive director at the Academy of Medicine of Cleveland and Northern Ohio. “Track their work, track outcomes, without interruption.”
Keeping violence interrupters in the emergency room — and adding more where possible — is vital, said Shanell Harris, the manager of MetroHealth’s trauma recovery center and a social worker who often works with families after violent crimes. She’s seen Cleveland Peacemakers establish relationships with families during turbulent and emotional moments after a shooting. That can be more difficult for MetroHealth staff, especially when families are frustrated with hospital policies around visitation or seeing their loved one.
“They are that middle person to communicate between [hospital] system and family,” Harris said. “And that makes a huge difference because they’re able to deescalate. They’re able to get information across to the patient, family, that MetroHealth staff can’t do.”
Jeffrey Crosby, the hospital responder for Cleveland Peacemakers at MetroHealth, meets patients at their bedside soon after they come in with a gunshot wound. He talks with them to find out what they need and shares what he can offer: gang resolution, without police involvement, mentoring and help finding a job. One of his key goals is to prevent people who come in with gunshot wounds from returning with another one.
“That’s a big problem — the ones that manage to live, they get shot over and over again,” Crosby said.
One challenge, though: The new funding initiative doesn’t begin until late summer or fall, leaving the violence interrupter position at University Hospitals vacant until then. That’s not good, said City Council Member Mike Polensek, who earlier this week said there’s a growing concern that gun violence in town is picking up for the summer. Two shootings this past weekend resulted in three young men dead and two injured, Channel 5 reported.
In the meantime, Mike Tobin, a spokesperson for University Hospitals, said the hospital still has social workers on staff to provide services to victims of shootings.
Funding challenges for violence intervention
Hospital-based violence interrupters and the Cleveland Peacemakers Alliance have always received funding from a patchwork of sources.
In the last decade, the City of Cleveland has pitched in to help fund the Peacemakers and violence interrupters using a number of different sources, including the city’s COVID relief funds. So have private groups, like United Way of Greater Cleveland, which funded the first hospital-based violence interrupter in 2016 at MetroHealth, according to cleveland.com.
Then, in 2023, the Cleveland Peacemakers got a hefty $2 million federal grant to help pay for staff as the Biden administration rolled out initiatives to interrupt violence.
But that grant was cut last April. Other funding sources were also running dry last year. A $70,000 grant from Cleveland to MetroHealth to pay for the hospital responders program ended in December 2025. The same month, COVID relief money from the state that helped pay for the violence interrupter position at University Hospitals lapsed, according to hospital spokesperson Tobin.
University Hospitals was able to keep paying their violence interrupter using other funding sources until March, Tobin said.
At MetroHealth, the hospital kept paying their violence interrupter’s salary with funding from a Victim of Crime Act grant it receives from the state.
The new investment from the Begun Foundation will allow MetroHealth to instead spend the state’s grant dollars to help crime victims get back on their feet, Harris said — things like groceries, utility payments and other basic needs.
City support for Cleveland Peacemakers?
While the City of Cleveland has repeatedly funded the Cleveland Peacemakers over the years — they granted the organization at least $75,000 in 2016 and $300,000 in 2023 — it currently is not giving money to the long-running violence prevention organization.
Tiffany Scruggs, who oversees the City of Cleveland office focused on violence prevention, said that’s because Cleveland Peacemakers is “in limbo” structurally. Its longtime director, Myesha Watkins, left to head the county’s Office of Violence Prevention last August.
“We will reach out to them once their staffing and personnel and leadership is in place to understand where they align and how they can fit in terms of our efforts to address and provide intervention and prevention for violence,” Scruggs said.
Polensek, the chair of council’s public safety committee, said he was not aware that the city was no longer funding hospital violence interruption efforts. He still supports funding the program since conflicts in emergency rooms are continuing, he said.
Kevin McDaniel is the interim executive director of Cleveland Peacemakers. In an emailed statement on behalf of the organization, he wrote that the organization is still providing guidance and mentorship to young people at-risk of committing and being victims of gun violence.
While funding changes have impacted some staffing, Cleveland Peacemakers currently employs one hospital responder and two outreach workers who work within the county court system to mentor young people involved in gun crimes.
McDaniel wrote that the organization is planning for staffing levels to increase at hospitals as a result of the Begun Foundation’s investment.
