Since early 2022, Port City United has connected community members with local non-profits and staffed a 24/7 contact center for individuals needing support with mental health, food security, and housing issues.
They also operated a mitigation and outreach division, previously known as violence interruption. This year, two employees from that division were arrested and ultimately fired, which amplified some officials’ criticism of the organization leading up to the June meeting, where PCU was formally cut from the budget.
Over 20 community members filed into the New Hanover County Courthouse during the meeting’s public comment period to request that Port City United be spared by the fiscally conservative Board. Many speakers spoke from personal experiences with PCU, claiming the organization’s resources as invaluable.
One of the outspoken supporters of PCU has been Frankie Roberts, the executive director of the nonprofit LINC Inc, which provides transition resources for justice-involved individuals. LINC — which stands for Leading Into New Communities — provides a number of community-based intervention programs, including permanent supportive housing and re-entry programs for justice-involved individuals.
Roberts was heavily involved when the county government was in the process of planning PCU, with six months of meetings with numerous non-profits. The county ultimately decided to house the program under county government — modeled on Durham’s Bull City United, which is housed under the city’s health department. Roberts had thought the process might head in a different direction.
“We thought that it was going to be a process in which non-profits would have the opportunity to have different components of the project or the program, versus the county creating a department,” Roberts said
Roberts, who has been the executive director of LINC for almost 20 years, said that because LINC has held space and done work in the Wilmington community for so long, they were one of PCU’s primary resources.
Now, existing independent nonprofits in the community like LINC must carry on harm reduction and violence prevention efforts across the county. At the same time, the county also provided less funding than those nonprofits might have hoped.
Non-county agencies – that is, local nonprofits – received the same $1.6 million in funding as last year, but the county committee that manages nonprofit funding requests recommended much more.
“I don’t know that they even looked at the impact of killing a whole department that works in a certain space, and then turning around and cutting the funding they were providing outside agencies,” Roberts said.
LINC employs the Community Health Worker (CHW) program model, something PCU adopted in a few of its initiatives.
Sokoto House, a Wilmington non-profit working in similar spheres to PCU and LINC, also uses the CHW model and offers occasional CHW training courses for professionals to be able to employ violence prevention strategies on the ground.
“We were at a really key point of opportunity when that incident happened,” Abdul Hafeedh Bin Abdullah, the executive director of Sokoto House, said. Abdullah has been nationally recognized for his research work on community violence — andthe approach he has helped define was recently adopted by Buncombe County.
Despite the fact that PCU was housed under the county government, independent violence-prevention organizations such as LINC and Sokoto House may have to pick up its slack in the coming months.
Abdullah said that the only thing that changes is that as PCU disappears, its funding disappears. He criticized the informality of PCU, echoing community concerns about how quickly the organization was thrown together— saying that it lacked “legitimate credentials of violence prevention.”
“There's going to be a significant void being left from what was created right at the time that PCU was developed,” Abdullah said. “That money wasn't previously present inside of our city dedicated to virus prevention.”
Roberts said that staff from PCU have reached out to him in search of opportunities at LINC and the organization has experienced an increase in calls.
He said that he often saw the impacts of the program’s work and had often called on PCU’s Mediation & Outreach team to intervene when LINC was called by individuals facing immediate danger, threats of violence or insecurity in the community.
“It has an impact, at least on a certain zip code,” he said.
Still, nonprofits across the county also look to continue investing in youth support, regardless of county funding.
Communities in Schools Cape Fear provides support for young people in southeastern NC from summer enrichment programs to redirection and restorative justice for justice-involved youth.
Kendall Englehardt, the communications manager for CIS said that despite this year’s budget blowback — particularly heightened by COVID-era relief coming to an end — CIS is optimistic for the year ahead.
“Organizations will continue doing what they're doing.” Abdullah said “They'll have to kind of revisit and go back to the table to negotiate with the county and with various other funding entities on how they can secure funding.”
