Who Are the Key Stakeholders?

Who Builds, Runs, and Champions These Programs

Trauma Surgeons At every well-documented HVIP in the field, a trauma surgeon founded or co-founded the program. Dr. Ashley Williams Hogue describes what drives that pattern: “She’s operated on the same victims who’ve been shot and then shot again in separate incidents.”¹

Dr. Randi Smith, Founder and Medical Director of the IVYY Project at Grady Memorial Hospital, established Atlanta’s program in January 2023 after years of treating returning patients in her trauma bay. She describes the motivation: “Every day, I would see patients coming in through our trauma bay injured by violence, and I knew I wanted to be part of the solution. I wanted to figure out what was bringing them here in the first place and prevent them from coming back.”²

Dr. Michel Aboutanos, Level 1 trauma surgeon at VCU Medical Center in Richmond, established Virginia’s model program, which now serves as the template for the state’s 12-hospital HVIP network and $8.5 million state investment.³

Dr. Amy Makley, Trauma Medical Director at UC Health in Cincinnati, has championed Hope and Shield (her hospital’s HVIP) before city council and in media coverage, grounding the program’s case in PTSD and mental health data.⁴

Dr. Ashley Williams Hogue, trauma surgeon at USA Health University Hospital in Mobile, Alabama, has been the medical face of the HALO program, describing from direct clinical experience the pattern of operating on the same patients repeatedly.⁵

Dr. Lindsey Dunkelberger, trauma surgeon at Prisma Health Richland Hospital in Columbia, South Carolina, leads the multidisciplinary team there and has described to local media what her team observes daily.⁶

Program Directors and Violence Recovery Specialists The operational leadership of most HVIPs sits with a program director or lead specialist, often someone who combines clinical training with community credibility.

Dwayne Johnson, Director of the University of Chicago Medicine’s Violence Recovery Program since 2024 (founding specialist since 2018), is the national figure most associated with HVIP program development and replication. His work on training other hospitals and on building the peer support infrastructure within a major academic medical center has defined the UChicago model. He describes the mission: “Our goal is to have our model duplicated throughout the nation. I truly believe this program is life-changing, and other institutions see that.”⁷

Kentral Galloway, director of Minneapolis’s Next Step program, has been the program’s public voice in local reporting and articulated what recovery from gun violence actually requires — addressing not just physical wounds but “not wanting to leave their house or go to certain areas of the city.”⁸

Lamicka Lovelace, who oversees Project Ujima at Children’s Wisconsin in Milwaukee, has described the immediate activation model: “They will meet the family right there in the emergency room to talk about services and resources.”⁹

Public Health Departments

Dr. Simbo Ige, Commissioner of the Chicago Department of Public Health, administers the city’s $3 million HVIP investment, which she has framed explicitly as treating “the psychological and emotional aspects” of violence alongside its physical manifestations.¹⁰ That framing, treating violence as a public health crisis, gives the program a policy home that is distinct from and complementary to its clinical home in the hospital.

Mayors and Political Officials

Mayor Craig Greenberg of Louisville has made Pivot to Peace central to his public safety platform, citing it by name in press conferences and his State of the City address, and is seeking reelection in 2026 on public safety results that include the program’s outcomes.¹¹

Former Mayor Sandy Stimpson of Mobile (left office November 2025) launched the HALO program and described the problem in terms that resonated across partisan lines: a victim of crime who leaves the hospital and returns to the same neighborhood becomes either a victim again or a perpetrator.¹²

Hospital Leadership and Boards Daniel Blum, chief executive of Sinai Hospital and Grace Medical Center in Baltimore, has articulated the institutional case: “Hospitals are no longer in the business of patch and release. They want to treat victims of violence in ways that will keep them from being victimized again or even becoming perpetrators.”¹³

Community-Based Organizations HVIPs are not effective in isolation. Their value depends on connections to the community organizations that can provide sustained wraparound services after the hospital phase ends. The University of Chicago VRP maintains active connections to more than 60 community-based social and behavioral health agencies.¹⁴ Grady Hospital provides warm handoffs to community organizations for housing, job, and food assistance rather than leaving patients to navigate referral lists independently.¹⁵

The Metropolitan Peace Academy in Chicago represents one model of community partnership — a training organization for street outreach workers that has developed relationships with UChicago Medicine’s VRP, creating mutual understanding between hospital-based and street-based violence intervention.¹⁶ Louisville’s Pivot to Peace routes services through Goodwill and Volunteers of America, drawing on their existing employment and job training infrastructure rather than building HVIP-specific capacity from scratch.¹⁷

Philanthropy Private philanthropy has played an unusually significant role in building the national HVIP field. The Block Hassenfeld Casdin Collaborative for Family Resilience, a $9.1 million investment at UChicago Medicine, funded research, evaluation, community partner grants, and vicarious trauma support for staff — the infrastructure that makes evidence generation possible and evidence generation is what produced the case for public funding.¹⁸ The Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation committed $25 million to Atlanta violence prevention efforts that include Dr. Smith’s IVYY Project work.¹⁹

The Metropolitan Peace Academy in Chicago represents an important community partner model — a training organization for street outreach workers that has developed relationships with UChicago Medicine’s VRP, creating mutual understanding and trust between hospital-based and street-based violence intervention.²⁰

Patients and Families At Grady Hospital in Atlanta, 98% of eligible patients agreed to receive program services.²¹ At Louisville’s Pivot to Peace, 85% agreed to speak with an intervention specialist.²² Lamicka Lovelace, director of Project Ujima at Children’s Wisconsin, describes the family component: “They will meet the family right there in the emergency room to talk about services and resources. It’s letting them know that, yes, you did go through this traumatic incident, but hoping that through our resources and interventions, you can get through this.”²³

National Organizations and Field Infrastructure

The Health Alliance for Violence Intervention (HAVI) is the national membership organization for hospital-based violence intervention programs. HAVI has been the primary advocacy organization pushing for Medicaid reimbursement, building the cost calculator tool with Everytown for Gun Safety, and convening practitioners. The organization’s agenda covers sustainable funding, workforce standards, and replication infrastructure, representing the field’s collective institutional priorities beyond individual program operations.

Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund has partnered with HAVI on research tools, including the hospital cost calculator, and provides political and communications infrastructure that helps programs make the funding case to city councils and state legislatures that have not yet made HVIP investments.

Philanthropy has played a critical role in building program infrastructure that neither hospital operating budgets nor public health grants typically cover. The Block Hassenfeld Casdin Collaborative for Family Resilience, launched with a $9.1 million gift from the Ellen and Ronald Block Family Foundation and the Hassenfeld Family Foundation, built the research, evaluation, and community partnership capacity around UChicago Medicine’s VRP that allowed the program to scale and replicate. The Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation committed $25 million to Atlanta violence prevention efforts that include Dr. Smith’s IVYY Project work. Philanthropic capital, in these examples, funded the infrastructure that made evidence generation possible, and evidence generation is what produced the case for public funding.

Who Criticizes These Programs — and Their Arguments

Critics from the Right and Institutional Skeptics

The most common objection from politically conservative voices is that programs “reward criminals” or extend services to people who have engaged in violent behavior. No named organizational opposition to HVIPs specifically — as distinct from CVI programs broadly — has been documented in the source materials.

“Not a hospital’s job” is the institutional version of the same skepticism, framed around scope rather than politics. “Security, not social workers” is a third variant, framing the choice as between physical security investment and intervention. Daniel Blum of Baltimore has articulated the response that hospital leaders have used: “Security responds after violence. Intervention stops it from starting. We do both.”²⁴

Critics from the Left and Advocates

Christy Lopez, Georgetown Law professor and a leading voice in the criminal justice reform movement, has argued broadly that CVI programs (including hospital-based ones) are “too limited in scope” and function as “a band-aid on a bullet wound” when deployed without structural reforms to address the poverty, disinvestment, and racism that produce community violence.²⁵ This critique does not oppose HVIPs so much as argue they are insufficient on their own — a position shared by many HVIP practitioners who would also advocate for structural interventions.

The selection bias concern, raised primarily by academic researchers, questions whether HVIP outcomes reflect program effectiveness or the self-selection of participants who were already more motivated to change. The Congressional Research Service has raised a related concern: that the evidence base is “insufficient to justify federal funding at proposed levels.”²⁶

Researchers and the Congressional Research Service

The Congressional Research Service has raised the concern that the evidence base for community violence intervention programs, including HVIPs, is “insufficient to justify federal funding at proposed levels.” Independent evaluations include two randomized controlled trials (Cooper et al. 2006; Cheng et al. 2008) and the Boston University target trial emulation (Jay et al. 2026), but a 2022 Johns Hopkins review found that the RCTs “were underpowered, and all but one were vulnerable to selection bias,” and that “overall evidence of reduced risks for violence was mixed.”²⁷