B2 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 22 , 2022
Charles Evans, the chief oper-
ating officer of the Progressive
Life Center, said that as Building
Blocks’ mission evolves, so will its
engagement with grant recipi-
ents.
“If you track this back to the
beginning, there was an impor-
tance on engaging the communi-
ty as quickly as possible in doing
something. On the PLC side, we
didn’t know that this was some-
thing that was going to continue
beyond that point,” Evans said.
Eli McCarthy, a longtime pro-
gram manager with the D.C.
Peace Team, which offers train-
ing in de-escalation skills, suc-
cessfully applied for a $5,000
grant last summer to set up a
community safety team in Co-
lumbia Heights.
McCarthy said he did not see
anyone from Building Blocks or
the PLC at any of the group’s
events, but he was notified about
the second grant opportunity via
email and met with PLC officials
during the second application
process. McCarthy was awarded
another $5,000 grant in January.
But asked to define Building
Blocks and how his own efforts fit
into its framework, McCarthy
was less confident.
“I think we’re quite clear on
how our own efforts contribute to
minimizing gun violence and so-
cial issues that lead to it,” he said.
“Building Blocks funds a lot of
different programs, so it’s not
clear how we all fit together in a
strategy. But I presume they have
that knowledge.”Emily Davies contributed to this
report.times caused tensions among the
groups.
“I’ve heard people argue over
who is in charge of what,” Hardy
said of the various city-led vio-
lence-prevention groups.
Harllee Harper said Building
Blocks is working to communi-
cate better within the govern-
ment and with residents. She
said that includes a forthcoming
dashboard with performance
metrics that will be publicly
available online, although she
could not specify when that
would be ready or what data it
would contain.
Judah Project founder Richard
White said his group used its
$5,000 grant to help youths in
the Shaw neighborhood who
have been exposed to gun vio-
lence develop skills needed to
enter the workforce. Representa-
tives of Building Blocks and the
Progressive Life Center, a D.C.
nonprofit organization that is
managing the grant program,
even appeared in virtual meet-
ings and appeared to be im-
pressed with the program, White
recalled.
But communication went si-
lent in the weeks afterward,
White said, and he did not know
that a second round of grants had
been awarded.
“There was no reaching out
from the city to see if the Judah
Project would be interested;
$5,000 is a Band-Aid on a broken
leg,” White said. “D.C. needs sus-
tained funding for ongoing, suc-
cessful community programs to
be truly effective in reducing gun
violence, rather than fragmented
responses.”more than 60 residents and com-
munity groups; another round of
grant recipients was announced
last month.
Grant recipients who spoke to
The Washington Post described
an overall positive experience
with the program, although some
expressed a tenuous grasp of how
they fit into Building Blocks’
larger mission. Others said fol-
low-up was inconsistent after the
grants were disbursed.
Jawanna Hardy, a longtime
activist and the founder of Guns
Down Friday, a nonprofit group
that supports families affected by
gun violence in D.C. and neigh-
boring Prince George’s County in
Maryland, said the $5,000 she
received from Building Blocks
last summer allowed her to ex-
tend the group’s work into sev-
eral other communities beyond
the Wheeler Road area where it
typically operates.
Among its efforts, Guns Down
Friday used the money to teach
at-risk community members how
to treat themselves and others
using first aid and CPR. Building
Blocks’ representatives attended
the events, said Hardy, 34, and
she praised the easy application
process, which she said has given
her and other community leaders
the confidence to apply for more
grants.
“For me, the grant opened up a
door,” Hardy said.
But she said that she has heard
criticisms of Building Blocks
from other activists. Some have
expressed confusion over how
the program’s work connects to
other city violence-prevention ef-
forts — a disconnect that has at“growing more unstable and dy-
namic,” with members crossing
boundaries, changing affiliations
and forming alliances with rivals.
Motives behind shootings involv-
ing crews are not what many
people think of as traditional
fights — over drugs or territory —
the report found, but more often
over women, alliances and per-
ceived disrespect.
The idea behind Building
Blocks, Muhammad said, is to
offer those people “services and
support and opportunities and
coach them into another life-
style.”
But he conceded that Building
Blocks has struggled at times.
“The structure has been what
we have been concerned about,
and the level of coordination, or
the lack thereof,” he said. “I think
there’s still some work to do, but
I’m very encouraged by the direc-
tion the District is going in.”
Roy Tolbert is living in a half-
way house, transitioning back
into society as he nears the end of
a 10-year prison sentence for
armed robbery. A friend put the
51-year-old in touch with Build-
ing Blocks, and he works with
DPW picking up trash and leaves.
He said the program is helping
him to get a fresh start and
provide for his four children.
“Absolutely it’s an incentive,” he
said, adding that in his own way,
he’s now “cleaning up the city.”
Another core component of
Building Blocks is its grant pro-
gram, which agency leaders say
supports community members
who have their own solutions to
make people safer. Last summer,
the city awarded $750,000 toChristopher Geldart, added at
the hearing: “It’s not a place. It’s
not a people. It’s a way to do
business.” He said it has taken
time to get agencies “to under-
stand how their mission fits in to
Building Blocks and their role in
the crime fight.”
The District’s director of gun
violence prevention, who runs
Building Blocks and oversaw the
emergency operations center, at-
tributed these fissures to the
program’s evolution from what
began as a short-term initiative.
“The mayor recognized, along
with the rest of the city, we’re in
an emergency and we need to do
something and do it now,” Linda
K. Harllee Harper said of Build-
ing Blocks’ inception. “And that’s
exactly what we did, while also
trying to figure out what is the
best way to approach this long-
term.”
City Administrator Kevin Don-
ahue said the emergency opera-
tions center, staffed by city work-
ers putting in extra hours, helped
to jump-start the effort but was
not a permanent solution.
The $15 million in start-up
money went to fund the center as
well as the grants to community
and nonprofit groups involved in
violence-prevention efforts. This
year, Bowser pumped $59 million
of American Rescue Plan federal
stimulus money into public
health initiatives to fight crime;
Building Blocks oversees this
money even though it is spread
among a number of agencies.
Officials said that means out-
reach workers on the streets now
can quickly tap into more re-
sources. For instance, the D.C.
Department of Employment Ser-
vices, which assists with job
placement and training, has 151
new slots set aside for residents
in the areas targeted by Building
Blocks. Similarly, the Depart-
ment of Public Works (DPW) has
crews dedicated to those same
areas to clean alleys, cut back
brush and tow abandoned vehi-
cles, which often are used to hide
drugs and guns.
And Building Blocks shifted
some staffers to the Office of
Neighborhood Safety and En-
gagement, which already has job-
training efforts and violence in-
terrupters, concluding that bol-
stering an existing program
would be more effective. That
office also has more space for its
own intensive jobs program.
Donahue said the city is trying
to meet the “unique needs of
people in fear for their lives,” who
are often the most distrustful of
government, the hardest to reach
and the least likely to seek help
on their own.
On one Building Blocks block
on Cedar Street SE, near where
an 11-year-old was killed in 2020,
violence interrupters mediated a
historic feud and led several peo-
ple into a job training program
with full-time coaching, Dona-
hue said. DPW hired others from
that neighborhood to work 12-
hour days collecting leaves and
fallen trees. Then those workers
refurbished a long-closed play-
ground and installed new lights
along the street.
David Muhammad, the execu-
tive director of the National Insti-
tute for Criminal Justice Reform
and a consultant to Building
Blocks, studied the victims and
perpetrators of every homicide in
the city in 2019 and 2020, and
nonfatal shootings in 2020. He
set out to identify “all the risk
factors” that point to “someone
being involved in gun violence,”
he said, along with motives be-
hind seemingly random gunfire.
“It’s a very small number of
people who are responsible for
the vast majority of gun violence
in the District,” Muhammad said.
“And most of that gun violence is
very predictable, and the people
are identifiable.”
He added, “And that is why we
know it’s preventable.”
In a report issued Thursday,
the institute said it had found
that a few hundred people were
responsible for up to 70 percent
of the city’s gun violence. Most
victims and suspects are Black
men, the report found, and near-
ly half had previously been jailed
or imprisoned, or were on court-
ordered supervision.
Personal disputes topped the
list of motives in homicides, at
20 percent, although the reason
for nearly as many killings re-
mained unknown. And the report
found that although many kill-
ings can be linked to gangs or
crews, those organizations are
BUILDING BLOCKS FROM B1
O∞cials: Anti-crime e≠ort now geared toward long term
MICHAEL ROBINSON CHAVEZ/THE WASHINGTON POSTMARVIN JOSEPH/THE WASHINGTON POST“I want to supportBuilding Blocks D.C.But I’m struggling, as alot of people are, tounderstand what it is.”
D.C. Council member Charles Allen
(D-Ward 6), who chairs the council’s
public safety committeeTOP: Linda K. Harllee Harper,
Washington’s gun violence
prevention director, announces
the Building Blocks D.C.
program in February 2021.
With $15 million in initial
funding for the effort, the city
opened a Gun Violence
Prevention Emergency
Operations Center. Now that
center is winding down.
ABOVE: Building Blocks D.C.
helped Roy Tolbert, who lives in
a halfway house, get a job with
the Department of Public
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