Executive Director Gary Slutkin, M.D., Responds to State Audit

 

Dear friends and colleagues of CeaseFire:

We want to make you aware that the State of Illinois' Office of the Auditor General recently conducted a program audit of the Chicago Project for Violence Prevention and its CeaseFire program. A complete copy of the report, as well as our response to its findings can be found at www.auditor.illinois.gov. The University of Illinois at Chicago and the Chicago Project welcome and appreciate the audit. We agreed with all of the recommendations and anticipate that it will help us improve our operations. We have begun to make the improvements already. We think this will help the program. We would not be surprised if this makes the news since CeaseFire has been in the news almost every day as a result of being part of the state budget veto.

The audit reviewed three fiscal years (2004 through 2006) of our work with 25 sites. The time frame was when the program expanded 400% -- from five sites with outreach to 25 sites with outreach -- across the state, from Rockford to East St. Louis. This rapid expansion, and CeaseFire's mission to respond to crisis situations to save lives, caused many challenges, including: identifying and selecting new partners; starting 20 new programs; and selecting, training, fielding and supporting the right personnel throughout the state at each site. We feel that we have been successfully fulfilling our mission as well as the state's intention of expanding the model and the new approach, and that we are having a very positive impact on the communities by reducing shootings and improving the safety of the neighborhoods.

The audit made several recommendations, which we accept, regarding grants management, documentation related to funding of community partners, timely execution of subcontract agreements with community partners, and procedures for reviewing subcontractor expenses.

The successful implementation of CeaseFire requires an immediate and frequently crisis response to interrupt violence, stop shootings and save lives -- particularly so during the summer months when violence predictably escalates. The project puts the needs of the community first to keep violence interrupters and outreach workers on the streets when urgently needed. We preferred to field workers when and where they were urgently needed rather than halting or failing to initiate CeaseFire activities until fully executed contracts were in place in some neighborhoods. When street conditions demanded this we disbursed funds through subcontracts with community partners as well as through direct expenditures on behalf of communities, such as the hiring of violence interrupters who do "cross-site work," and our hiring of outreach workers to fill gaps when different sites had transition matters or were unable to hire workers for various reasons.

As we think you are aware, we make the urgent needs and immediate safety of the community the main priority. Our goal is to keep these life saving outreach workers and violence interrupters on the streets to save lives. Additionally, we realize that we cannot grow at a staggering pace should we be allowed to do so in the future, without significantly strengthening administrative capabilities.

The success of CeaseFire has been recognized by many external organizations, including the U.S.
Department of Justice. CeaseFire has been recognized as a cutting-edge program based upon a model and set of methods previously applied for reversing epidemics. While there is no exact roadmap for ending violence, CeaseFire has developed a new model which has successfully and strategically prevented several hundred violent acts from taking place in our state, and is beginning to change social norms in some of our most violence-plagued communities. This is of benefit to everything we are trying to improve in our neighborhoods from economic development to education, as well as saving health care and other costs.

As of last month, prior to the most recent budget veto, CeaseFire had 140 trained and skilled persons on the street with the mission of keeping people from shooting and killing each other. These men and women put themselves in harm's way every day and night to stop killings, and we believe deserve our continued strong support.

If you have any questions, comments, or concerns about the Auditor General's report, or anything else at this time please call me without hesitation at 312-996-5524.

Sincerely,

Gary Slutkin, MD
Executive Director
Chicago Project for Violence Prevention
Professor, Epidemiology and International Health University of Illinois School of Public Health Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics