Durham Could Fund Office for Gun Violence Survivors

It’s Wednesday, March 20.

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Good morning, readers. 

In Durham’s next budget, some residents hope to see the city fund a three-year pilot program called the Office of Survivor Care, which would offer support to survivors of gun violence and their families using restorative justice methods such as facilitative listening circles and peer support groups.

The pilot would be housed within the Community Safety Department. Unlike Durham’s other publicly-funded survivor support services, which the police department and the DA’s office provide, the Office of Survivor Care wouldn’t limit its services to survivors who are involved in ongoing trials or investigations. 

“Survivor support cannot focus merely on the survivors of violence where an arrest was made and a criminal trial ensued,” the proposal for the pilot states. “For one thing, many harmed by violence never report the incident to crisis response or law enforcement. For another, only a fraction of the violent incidents reported to law enforcement result in arrest. Of those, only a fraction result in any criminal trial. Even those criminal trials provide little healing to violence survivors and their families.”

The pilot’s initial year would cost $220,000 and its second and third years would cost $820,000. More than a third that funding would be used to cover funeral and burial expenses for homicide victims’ families and would be reimbursed by North Carolina’s Crime Victims’ Compensation Fund.

The pilot has already had its own pilot of sorts: from 2022 to 2023, the Community Safety Department collaborated with NCCU, Duke, and Restorative Justice Durham on a program called Prescriptions for Repair that encouraged survivors of gun violence to share their stories during a series of listening sessions.

At the Durham city council’s budget hearing on Monday, many of the residents who called on the city to fund the Office of Survivor Care had volunteered as facilitators for Prescriptions for Repair, including former State of Things radio host Frank Stasio. Stasio told a story of a survivor he worked with who initially said they weren’t affected by gun violence but then “broke down several times and cried and said, ‘I’ve never done this before,’ and then asked if he could speak with us even when the money ran out, and then asked if he could volunteer,” Stasio said. 

“This is the kind of thing that clinicians and psychologists and therapists talk about with us all the time: Hurt people hurt people. Healed people heal people. Without healing the trauma that is rampant in our community, it is unlikely that enforcement is enough to do the job to keep the public safe.”

Have a good Wednesday.

—Lena

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