Local leaders hope to fight crime with gardening. With wrestling. With dancing. With meditating.

Those activities and many others are getting support from the new Cleveland Neighborhood Safety Fund. Established late in 2023, the fund will provide grants for community-driven, evidence-informed programs that address the root causes of violence and enhance safety across the city.   

The City of Cleveland seeded the fund with $10 million in ARPA money and in late December announced the first round of semi-annual $1 million grants—going to 29 grassroots organizations and programs in 14 Cleveland neighborhoods. The awards range from $7,500 to $60,000.

The fund’s leaders and community advisors seek to tackle the root causes of crime, which declined nationally for three decades, resurged early in the pandemic, and continue to spread much harm and fear.

“You can’t police your way out of this,” says Dale Robinson Anglin, vice president of proactive grantmaking for the Cleveland Foundation, which helps run the fund. She says that, by the time police deal with crime, “It’s almost too late.” So the fund fights factors such as educational and vocational deficits, family conflicts, and abuse.

“No one organization or entity can solve these problems alone,” said Cleveland Mayor Justin M. Bibb in a statement,

The money granted to the 29 nonprofits will, for the most part, be used for ongoing activities with and some funding for new endeavors. To qualify, applicants needed to have other sources of funds as well.

The programs use specific activities to teach broader skills that help in schools, workplaces, homes, and communities.

Wrestle it out

“Beat the Streets keeps kids out of trouble,” says Elijah Guzman, 15, one of the young wrestlers in the national program’s Cleveland chapter in Slavic Village.

The Cleveland chapter employs a couple dozen part-time coaches, including some who double as head coaches at local high schools. The free, co-ed program gives wrestlers T-shirts, shorts, shoes, safe space, and role models.

Beat the Streets trains boys and girls to wrestleStudent Jason Hackett finds wrestling a good diversion. “It takes stuff off your mind,” the 12-year-old says. “It takes stress off. It changes our lives and helps us do better things.”

Demetrius O. Williams, who leads the Beat the Streets Cleveland chapter, says, “We want kids to win at life more than wrestling.”

Chapter head coach Anthony Spooner says wrestlers learn life skills from both their wins and their losses.

“They’re not puffing up their chests anymore,” he observes. “It’s a quiet confidence. The humility and discipline carry right back into school.”

The youth need to do well at school to wrestle. Eleven Beat the Street alumni are now at colleges, including the prestigious Columbia University in New York City, with 10 of them wrestling there.

Neighborhood healing

The safety fund is also helping Elements of Internal Movement Eternal Pull Inc., whose participants help feed and green the Imperial Avenue neighborhood, known for the Anthony Sowell murders.

“When you meet the basic needs of food, crime decreases,” says leader Shirley Bell. “As you take care of your green spaces, the crime decreases. You’re not going to vandalize something you put work into.”

In other outdoor work, Sankofa Circle International will use its grant to start a program called “The Growing Space: Summer of Healing Cohort,” where twelve participants will tend a newly acquired garden in Collinwood.

Sankofa’s program curator, Katarina Smiley, says gardening helps victims recover. “It allows you to be in touch with yourself and with nature,” she says.

Other grantees teach the arts. Cleveland Foundation’s Anglin says those activities help people understand themselves, their families, and their communities.

Balance Point Studios on Kinsman Road, for instance, offers photography, videography, and bicycling. Leader Donald Black Jr. says police often harass minority bicyclists, so he teaches them how to handle themselves during stops. For instance, “You can’t be chased if you don’t run.”

Ghetto Therapy runs weekly sessions at two locations on Cleveland’s east side locations for several dozen residents at a time and participants include both victims and perpetrators of crime.

“My whole thing is to heal the violence,” says leader Walter Patton, who adds that most new participants have never had therapy before. Many go on to individual therapy, paying on a sliding scale.

Nonprofit Building Hope in the City will help the Healing Care Counseling Center expand its group sessions from 14 Cleveland public schools to 24. In eight weekly encounters, students learn anger management, conflict resolution, and other skills for living in peace.

The center’s owner, Courtney Hauser, says the sessions help boost grades and reduce aggression. At one recent session, or instance, a student says he'd learned that it’s okay for Black boys to cry.

Anglin says that many anti-crime groups are small and led by crime victims or their survivors, rather than career professionals in the field. “This sector is very unsophisticated. It’s very passion-based,” he says.

The Cleveland Foundation plans to help all 150 applicants—not just the ones chosen for grant money—in networking, gathering data, get better results, and perhaps qualify for future grants.

Anglin says the first round of grants was especially diverse. She expects future rounds to focus on approaches that seem to be succeeding.

There is more information about the Cleveland Neighborhood Safety Fund, including a list of grantees, on the Cleveland Foundation website.