Co-creating a community violence intervention and youth education initiative that secured $300K+ to build safer futures.
Written by: Niki Lemeshka
Before becoming a full-time grant professional, most of my experience was dedicated to intimate partner violence response. My lifelong passion for the issue grew from an experience in my teen years that involved the death of a friend to firearms-involved family violence. Even as I transitioned into grant consulting, I have been able to maintain a connection to improving community responses to this issue, and, in many ways, through my collaborations with clients like the Family Crisis Center of Walker, Dade, Catoosa, and Chattooga Counties, I feel like I am making a bigger impact than I ever was able to in direct services.
Family Crisis Center is a family violence program serving a four-county region in rural Northwest Georgia. Their CEO, Rachel, embodies the spirit of community collaboration that makes every project we work on together positive and energizing. She never gives up, and neither do I! Together, over the last couple of years, we have tackled many important grant applications that improve the Center’s ability to respond to emerging local needs. One project I am particularly proud of was born from a grant opportunity I identified, which perfectly aligned with both my and Rachel’s passions: addressing the dangerous intersection of gun violence and intimate partner violence. This is a growing concern across Georgia, and is particularly devastating in rural communities where women face higher rates, greater frequency, and often more severe abuse compared to their urban counterparts.
Together, Rachel and I developed the concept for the Building Resilience and Violence Education (BRAVE) Program, designed to achieve two primary goals: establishing a regional community violence intervention program and launching an anti-violence education program for at-risk youth. While Rachel built strong partnerships with law enforcement and contractors to bring the program to life, I focused on leveraging my grantwriting expertise: shaping and editing the proposal narrative, sourcing data and statistics, building a budget, and developing numerous attachments and an MOU. I love collaborating with clients in this way – pairing their subject-matter expertise with my grantwriting skills to create meaningful, fundable projects that empower community change.
Despite a short turnaround time of less than two weeks from start to finish, our teamwork paid off. Family Crisis Center received more than $300,000 to pursue the initiative and bring essential resources to rural survivors and their families while equipping youth with the tools to break cycles of violence before they take root. For me, the BRAVE Program represented not only another grant award for one of my fabulous clients but also a step toward honoring the memory of a friend I lost to violence at far too young an age. Creating these types of opportunities to build safer futures on a larger scale is why I became a grant consultant at RIC. Here, we align our personal passion with professional skills that truly create measurable impact in communities across the country.
