By Tony Woods
Published on June 1, 2026 (Originally published by the TRiiBE)
Community Violence Intervention (CVI) – a public safety approach rooted in prevention, outreach, mentorship, and conflict mediation to interrupt cycles of violence before they escalate – is purposeful, empowering, and oftentimes, life-changing work.
As we honored Mental Health Awareness Month last month, we continue to recognize today an often-overlooked truth: the people doing this work need healing, too.
CVI is a field that requires healing and mental wellness. In fact, it demands it. To effectively step into this work, you’re faced with addressing deeply embedded wounds that could keep you from reaching your full potential. But, on the other side of that healing comes peace, strength, and empathy. It’s a transformation I know all too well.
Let me take you back: When I first came into violence intervention work in 2009, I came in carrying trauma of my own. And with every shooting I responded to, every family I sat with, even more weight stacked on top of the pain I hadn’t resolved. After a while, I stopped knowing what to feel. Somewhere along the way, we started counting lives instead of feeling their loss.
But these aren’t numbers, they’re people.
The pain and trauma we face can stack so high that your mind and body shut down just to keep going. Not wanting to live that reality, I did the necessary work to make peace with my past, while using those lived experiences as fuel to help others. In this new chapter, as I lead my organization, I make it my mission to protect our workers and their well-being.
At Public Equity, we’ve launched a first-of-its-kind wellness initiative for frontline CVI workers. Staff members have their own wellness plan, not some cookie-cutter checklist, but something real, built around their needs, their struggles, and their peace. They don’t go at this alone. We built a multidisciplinary team of clinicians, wellness practitioners, and other supports who walk alongside them, making sure they’re cared for from every angle.
Because here’s what I know: Titles don’t heal trauma. I learned that long before I ever became an executive director. And just because we hand someone a job title doesn’t mean they stop carrying their pain. Too often in this work, we act like putting “outreach worker” or “violence interrupter” on someone’s ID badge suddenly makes them whole. It doesn’t. They’re still walking into this work with wounds, and if we don’t make space for healing, those wounds only get deeper.
Most of us working in CVI are going into the same neighborhoods that broke us in the first place. We return every day to corners where we lost friends, blocks where we saw blood on the pavement, communities that carry the same scars we do. That proximity makes us credible, but it also means we’re constantly reliving the very trauma we’re trying to heal. Without intentional wellness, that cycle eats away at us.
For CVI, investing in mental health isn’t optional and it isn’t a luxury. It is necessary and essential to this work.
If we, as CVI practitioners, are serious about saving lives and transforming communities, then we must start with ourselves. We can’t keep asking frontline staff to pour from an empty cup. In order to improve the lives of others, we first must improve our own.
This is not about numbers. It’s not about retention. It’s about restorative justice. It’s about valuing the people doing the healing as much as we value the healing itself.
If we want frontline CVI workers to be impactful, sustainable, and whole, then wellness has to move from the margins to the center of our practice. Lived experience may get us into the game, but wellness is what will allow us to keep playing, and to win real change for our communities.
