HARRISBURG – CeaseFirePA Education Fund today launched Violence, Interrupted, a video storytelling and six-figure public education campaign highlighting the largely unseen work of Community Violence Intervention (CVI) professionals who stop shootings before they happen.
The campaign launched with five first-person stories from violence intervention workers in Philadelphia, York and the Lehigh Valley, telling real-world stories of de-escalated conflict, individuals turned away from violent pathways and retaliation halted through work with people at highest risk of violence.
“The stories are the tip of the iceberg of the everyday public safety professionals who are interrupting conflict before someone dies,” said Adam Garber, CEO of CeaseFirePA Education Fund. “These are the people who step between individuals intent on violence, prevent retaliation after a shooting, and build trusted relationships to divert someone on or heading down a dangerous path. Pennsylvania’s gun homicide rate is at a generational low because of them, but until now, most people have never heard about their work because they stopped the shooting before it appeared on the news. We’re going to change that.”
Watch the five launch videos featuring Tiff, Mike, Zaleeae, Jamall, and Omar. More stories from communities across the Commonwealth will be added in the coming weeks.
The series is designed to broaden the public’s and policymakers’ understanding of public safety by showing the critical role CVI can play alongside law enforcement. While many Pennsylvanians understand public safety primarily through the lens of law enforcement, CVI programs work upstream — intervening before violence occurs and reaching people and situations that traditional systems often cannot.
One of the stories follows Jamall, a community violence intervention worker at New Kensington CDC in Philadelphia who received a call about a conflict at a neighborhood deli. When he arrived, he recognized one of the men involved as someone known to carry firearms. Jamall used his professional training, his existing relationship with the individual and his credibility in the neighborhood to help ensure the conflict ended without gunfire.
It is the kind of outcome that rarely becomes a headline.
When community violence intervention works, there may be no crime scene, no emergency room visit and no breaking-news alert. Instead, those successes are often documented only in impact reports and internal summaries from organizations doing the work day after day.
The videos showcase the range of approaches used by community violence intervention programs across the Commonwealth, including street outreach, hospital-based intervention, conflict mediation, reentry support and workforce development.
Since 2021, Pennsylvania has invested nearly $400 million in violence prevention initiatives, with additional investments from the City of Philadelphia and Allegheny County. Those investments have helped communities build, expand and strengthen evidence-based programs designed to reach people at the highest risk of becoming victims or perpetrators of gun violence. CeaseFirePA’s 2025 report, Invest More to Save More, examines the connection between Pennsylvania’s historic CVI investments and the decline in gun homicides across the Commonwealth. The work has drawn bipartisan support from lawmakers who recognize community-based intervention as an important part of a broader public-safety strategy.
Garber said the campaign is also intended to underscore what is at stake if those investments disappear.
“These videos are a call to our elected leaders to follow the evidence and sustain these programs for the long term,” Garber said. “We have seen what happens when communities have the resources to intervene before violence occurs. We cannot afford to lose that progress or return to the deadly surge in gun violence Pennsylvania experienced after the pandemic.”
Violence, Interrupted will roll out across digital platforms and through earned media, with additional stories highlighting violence intervention workers and programs across Pennsylvania.
ABOUT CEASEFIREPA EDUCATION FUND
CeaseFirePA Education Fund is the Commonwealth’s leading organization dedicated to ensuring not another life is lost to gun violence. We build awareness about the impacts of gun violence in the Commonwealth by lifting up the voices of survivors and analyzing data on the drivers of violence in the Commonwealth. We run public education campaigns to foster civic engagement and build diverse coalitions that reflect the full toll of this public health crisis. And, we help decision-makers understand the real-world impacts of their actions and inaction.
