The Cost of Safety: What Happens When Frontline Funding Disappears

For many people, safety doesn't start with police cars and courtrooms. It starts with the victim advocate who answers the phone at 2 a.m. It starts with the outreach worker who shows up at the hospital bedside of a shooting victim before the cycle of retaliation can begin. It starts with the reentry program that helps someone leaving prison find a job before they find themselves back in a cell.

Our new survey, The Cost of Safety, asked 105 community-based organizations across 28 states a simple question: what has the last year of funding turmoil actually done to your ability to keep people safe? The findings paint a clear picture of a field under strain.

Four in five organizations have lost funding. Between February 2025 and February 2026, 80% of surveyed organizations experienced funding reductions or terminations. The federal government drove the largest share of these losses (49%), but state, county, and even philanthropic funding all tightened at the same time leaving organizations with nowhere to turn when one revenue stream disappeared.

The impact shows up immediately, in real services to real people. Among organizations hit by cuts, 61% had to reduce services, 48% saw wait times climb, and 47% eliminated entire programs. Forty-two percent laid off staff. These aren't abstractions. One organization told us that after losing staff, they could no longer deploy outreach workers immediately following a shooting. The trusted, familiar responders who de-escalate tension and connect grieving families to help simply weren't there when they were needed most. Victim services and youth programming were the most frequently eliminated services in the entire survey.

The impact falls hardest on organizations closest to the community. Small organizations with budgets under $250,000 reported the most severe disruption. Community violence intervention and reentry programs, work with a strong evidence base behind it, were hit harder than other service types. Rural providers, who already contend with thin staffing and few local funders, face the steepest odds of all. And grassroots organizations rooted in the communities most affected by violence - often the ones with the deepest trust and the best access to people who need help  - are also the ones least equipped to compete for complex, paperwork-heavy grants.

This isn't the result of one isolated decision. It's systemic. Nearly 90% of organizations said federal funding has become harder to access; 80% said the same of state funding. When every funding stream tightens at once, there is no backstop. As one respondent put it: "When funding is uncertain, it is the community and those most in need of care who feel the impact first."

The programs absorbing the brunt of these losses are the ones with strong outcomes behind them: community violence intervention models linked to double-digit reductions in shootings; reentry services shown to cut recidivism; trauma recovery centers that keep survivors from becoming repeat victims and increase cooperation with law enforcement. When that infrastructure shrinks, the effects reach well beyond nonprofit budgets, they reach public safety itself.

The report lays out a clear path forward for funders and policymakers: 

• Provide multi-year, flexible funding instead of unpredictable short-term grants
• Invest in prevention alongside crisis response
• Simplify grant applications so smaller and rural organizations can actually compete; and
• Fund the capacity-building - training, communications, financial systems - that keeps grassroots organizations standing. 

Notably, 88% of surveyed organizations said what they need most isn't more paperwork, but training on funding strategy itself.

Every dollar that leaves a trauma recovery center, a street outreach team, or a reentry program is a dollar that leaves the infrastructure that keeps neighborhoods safe. The organizations on the frontlines aren't asking for a bailout — they're asking for the kind of sustained, stable investment that lets them keep doing work that's already proven to save lives.

Read the full report, The Cost of Safety, for the complete data and recommendations.