City Council wants more information from groups that got money for anti-violence work
Pittsburgh City Council approved a new process Tuesday for monitoring how community groups spend grant money from the city’s violence prevention fund.
Council staff created a three-page questionnaire for more than 30 community groups that received grants from the Stop the Violence fund. The grants are part of what Mayor Ed Gainey has called a Plan for Peace.
Almost $1 million was given to these groups, with the express goal of reducing violence in the city. The money comes from the Stop the Violence Trust Fund, which receives 6% of the police budget. Some of that money is allocated to the Office of Community Health and Safety, but the majority is saved for grants to outside organizations.
“We want something so that we can explain to the public how the dollars are being spent,” Council President Theresa Kail-Smith said when the legislation approved Tuesday was first introduced in January.
Some of the new reporting requirements include basic information such as how many staff members organizations have in their violence prevention programs and in what areas of the city they work. Other parts of the questionnaire include outlining specific outcomes the groups are striving for, what their time frames are for achieving those goals and how many events the groups have held since receiving funds.
The organizations are also asked to scrutinize their own programs by answering questions such as one asking whether programs are too broad to achieve violence reduction goals.
The new reporting is the first step in monitoring money in all the city’s trust funds, including the Housing Opportunity Fund and the newly created Food Justice Fund, Ms. KailSmith has previously said.
Council decided the antiviolence groups were “the most immediate” to review because the money had already been allocated and spent by the organizations, Ms. Kail-Smith said. In the future, she said, Council will work with the mayor’s office before grants are distributed to “get something we can all agree on.”
There is no timetable for when the new surveys will be distributed to the groups or when the information gleaned from them will be made public.