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The goal of the Community Action Grants (CAG) Program was to provide resources and technical assistance to communities to decrease youth violence through community health promotion programs. The objectives of CAG were to: 1) identify successful methods for delivering youth violence interventions at the community level; 2) determine if multifaceted community programs can reduce rates of violent behavior, injury and death associated with youth violence; and 3) build the capacity of local community agencies and organizations to intervene successfully in the youth violence problem. The Community Action Grants Program strongly encouraged representative decisionmaking from a segment of the population that is not often called upon to be active participants in the social services and policy planning process, namely young people.

The Foundation provided Community Action Planning Grants for 18 communities in California. Priority for funding was given to organizations that could demonstrate the following: 1) visible, broad-based collaborative community effort; 2) culturally appropriate services and linguistic capabilities to meet community needs; 3) a project plan that had the greatest likelihood of furthering the goals and objectives of the VPI; 4) institutionalized process by which program participants or clients were integrated into organized decision-making – particularly youth involvement in the site visit; 5) staff and board that accurately reflect the community the organization serves; 6) experience working in networks or coalitions; 7) experience in community organizing and planning for community action; 8) commitment to and/or experience in working with adolescents and/or young adults; and 9) a cost-efficient approach to the budgeting of the requested funds. All 18 Community Action Projects (CAPs) successfully completed their planning year and were awarded four-year operational grants.

Grants were awarded to community collaboratives that included youth most at risk to pursue action at the local level through a multitiered strategy that combined direct services, policy, media advocacy and community mobilization. Funded sites were encouraged, but not required, to participate in the policy activities of the Pacific Center and the VPI public education campaigns. The CAG Program was modeled after the CDC approach of creating a collaborative response to violence. As such, several grants were awarded to larger multi-service organizations that were cornerstone agencies in the community and could undertake the work of building a coalition and provide the infrastructure for the development of the programs. Grants were also awarded to grassroots community-based organizations including some new entities with little organizational structure.

In June 1998, after a competitive RFP process, seven CAPs were not selected to continue as VPI grantees. These grantees were awarded one-year “bridge” grants to help organizations transition to alternative sources of funding or phase out program activities. Each of these bridge grantees continued to provide violence prevention work at some level – several sites continued smaller scale projects and others incorporated efforts with other activities.

Nine of the original sites were awarded continuation grants to support and institutionalize efforts. By the final year of the Initiative, eight of the originally funded CAPs remained with the VPI; however, many had changed over the course of the Initiative. The evolution and development of the CAPs over the 10 years varied, and four of the remaining eight CAPs, were not the originally funded organizations.

In 2000, the Board also approved the Promising Practices grantmaking component of the Community Action Grants Program to extend the Initiative’s reach and access to Foundation resources to support other viable and competitive community-based programs. The Promising Practices component was structured to support a variety of ongoing programs including: comprehensive youth programs, community service and volunteerism; mentoring and rites-of-passage programs; mediation and conflict resolution programs; school-linked youth services; and teen courts/alternative sentencing programs. Twelve grants were made to organizations throughout the state for this grantmaking program.