In the years that Angelica Hardy has worked with families recovering from gun violence, she’s recognized a common problem – securing safe housing while they recovered from injury.
“They’re already fighting for their life to stay alive, and then they accomplish doing that, but now once they are discharged, they have nowhere else to go,” she said. “And now they face the challenge of being shot again.”
So when she began thinking about starting her own nonprofit, providing that housing was a central component of her plan. Recently, after graduating from the Community Violence Intervention Leadership Academy (CVILA), she feels better equipped to make this dream real.
The Academy works to deepen leadership and management experience among community safety leaders, so they can bring back that expertise to their organizations and make sure their important work is implemented at scale in a sustainable way. Hardy, the Resilience Program Manager at the Alliance of Local Service Organizations in Chicago, participated in the program’s fifth cohort.
“The ultimate goal is to make our communities safer,” said Dr. Chico Tillmon, executive director of the CVILA at the University of Chicago Crime Lab.
An Executive Leadership Education Crash Course
Community violence intervention has proven to be effective, but it's often hard to scale and sustain these programs. Many leaders become burned out after encountering trauma on a daily basis while having limited resources; federal funding declining has only made this a more urgent issue.
Although the homicide rate has decreased nationwide since the 1990s, many Black and brown communities continue to experience disproportionately high rates of gun violence. And the day-to-day work to combat this typically falls on law enforcement and community violence intervention organizations.
The CVILA is both a certification program as well as an executive leadership education crash course. It gives participants hands-on education on topics like values-based leadership, organizational development, resource mobilization, community engagement, and data for decision-making.
“A lot of the people who do this work rely on lived experience [of violence and incarceration] but haven’t had access to [professional development or higher education], so I look at this as an opportunity to build organizational skills that allow them to scale, but also to run CVI organizations more effectively,” Tillmon said.
The Academy curriculum prepares leaders to not only strengthen their organizations, but to expand the strategies, systems, and infrastructure needed to effectively reduce violence. Participants spend five months immersed in in-person sessions focused on leadership, management, operations, strategy, trauma-informed practices, advocacy with ultimately two goals: reducing gun violence and scaling the community violence intervention field. The curriculum is grounded in the strongest available evidence, informed by data, and shaped by the realities of the communities most affected by violence.
“We do more than teach leaders what works. We equip them with the skills to evaluate, measure, and strengthen the impact of their own programs,” Tillmon said. “By developing leaders who can translate research into practice and practice into evidence, we’re helping to professionalize the field and build a stronger foundation for lasting reductions in gun violence.”
The Academy's more than 150 graduates work across 60 cities; collectively, their organizations address every aspect of the community safety ecosystem, including: outreach, mediation, case management, transitional housing, survivor support, research, advocacy, and policy development.
Leading with Empathy and Determination to Do No Harm
At the Alliance of Local Service Organizations, which provides services and training as well as advocacy to address domestic violence and community violence, Hardy oversees a team of case managers and victim advocates. Through the CVILA, she learned to address gaps in professional readiness among employees—many working their first job—with patience and training instead of disciplinary measures.
She found discussions with other cohort members valuable, gaining new perspectives and affirmation of her approach. One key lesson was the importance of not causing harm. Every referral carries weight: connecting participants with trusted organizations is essential because failure can lead to people disengaging altogether. "For some people, that might just be their last hope."
It’s an issue that can snowball, she said, as word spreads in the community. "Even though you may only be interacting with one participant who's technically on your caseload, in reality you're working with more than that. Because they're going to go back to the neighborhood and communicate with their friends, their families, and other people, and they're going to tell their experience."
Another benefit of the Academy was the opportunity to collaborate with peers nationwide. Hardy valued these connections and found one skit exercise especially insightful. "We were from different organizations, but we had to act as one. It showed us how everyone has a role that they play, and when we're coming to the table trying to advocate, we have to make sure that everyone is on the same page." Those collaborative experiences underscored the complexities of supporting survivors beyond individual interactions.
Seeding Restorative Roots
Hardy is deeply familiar with the challenges gunshot survivors face. They can’t heal properly in a shelter and often, other types of housing may bar them, she said.
With those realities in mind, Hardy hopes to launch a new nonprofit, the Restorative Roots Network, to offer transitional housing to unhoused survivors of gunshot wounds, plus wraparound services - mental health support, case management, legal assistance, workforce development. The goal is to provide 24 beds, where people can stay for up to eight months. Right now, nothing like this truly exists, she said.
“The idea was based off of the communities that I serve, the community that I grew up in and what was missing.”
The Academy helped her understand on a granular level how to make this dream real. And, as a recipient of the Academy’s Capstone Innovation Prize, she has $5,000 in prize money as seed funding to work toward her plan.
“It really gave me the layout of exactly how, if you are starting a nonprofit, you’re asking for funding, all the tools you would need,” she said.
Hardy’s experience illustrates how coordinated efforts among organizations can extend support and resources throughout entire communities.
“We have people that are really touching the people that are most vulnerable,” Tillmon said. “You can see the impact we have on the country.”