Press Release: Gov. Evers, Wisconsin Office of Violence Prevention Award $15 Million to Organizations Across Wisconsin to Reduce Crime, Prevent Violence, and Keep Kids, Families, and Communities Safe

• Supporting multi-agency law enforcement investigations;  
• Using crime gun intelligence tools;  
• Implementing suicide prevention education to identify individuals in crisis, including at the point of sale for firearms;  
• Implementing or improving threat assessment training;   
• Promoting and administering safe storage and gun buyback programs;   
• Providing technical assistance and support to help design, implement, and/or staff evidence-based community policing, crime reduction initiatives, and gun violence crisis response teams;   
• Implementing or enhancing domestic violence prevention programs;  
• Implementing school-based programming, including suicide prevention and firearm safety training; and  
• Supporting mentoring and after-school programs and other efforts aimed at keeping kids out of trouble and out of harm’s way. 

A list of the grant recipients, as well as additional information about the State Violence Prevention Grant Program, is available on the Wisconsin Office of Violence Prevention webpage.  

ADDITIONAL BACKGROUND ON EVERS ADMINISTRATION’S EFFORTS TO END CYCLES OF VIOLENCE, REDUCE CRIME, AND KEEP KIDS, FAMILIES, AND COMMUNITIES SAFE   

Last year, Gov. Evers kicked off 2025 by declaring the Year of the Kid and announcing an executive order creating a new statewide Wisconsin Office of Violence Prevention in the wake of a deadly shooting at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison that took the lives of two people and injured six others. When the governor signed Executive Order #254 creating the Wisconsin Office of Violence Prevention, he concurrently announced he would be directing $10 million in federal funding to support the office’s work, including supporting a new grant program aimed at reducing crime, preventing violence, including intimate partner and gun violence, and efforts to improve community safety across Wisconsin. The governor proposed to provide sustainable, ongoing state funding for the Wisconsin Office of Violence Prevention, as well as comprehensive gun safety reform initiatives, in his 2025-27 Executive Budget, but the governor’s measures—including policies supported by the overwhelming majority of Wisconsinites—were rejected by Republicans in the Wisconsin State Legislature during the state budget process.  

Despite Republicans’ failure to include these measures in the budget, in January, Gov. Evers announced his 2026 legislative agenda and urged lawmakers to join him in working across the aisle on several key priorities, including investing in combating domestic and intimate partner violence and supporting survivors, as well as efforts to keeps kids, families, and communities safer by reducing crimes involving guns.   

Building on this work, during his 2026 State of the State address, Gov. Evers announced a new exciting partnership between the Milwaukee Bucks and the Evers Administration to raise awareness of domestic violence in Wisconsin communities, end the cycle of violence, and keep families safe. Through the Wisconsin Department of Health Services (DHS), the Evers Administration will be providing over $180,000 to support an awareness and prevention campaign to ensure Wisconsinites know the signs of abuse, how to get help, and ways to support a loved one.

Over his tenure as governor, Gov. Evers and his administration have worked to address violence and keep kids, families, and communities safe. In October 2019, the governor called a special session of the Wisconsin State Legislature to address gun violence in the state of Wisconsin and proposed two critical proposals relating to universal background checks and extreme risk protection orders. Despite the fact that a majority of Wisconsinites, including gun owners, support the implementation of commonsense measures like universal background checks (79 percent) and extreme risk protection orders (81 percent), Republican lawmakers refused to take up the governor’s special session bills.  

In recent years, Gov. Evers has directed more than $100 million of the state’s allocation of ARPA funds toward community safety and violence prevention efforts. In 2021, the governor announced an initial $45 million investment to address the root causes of violence by investing in programs and interventions being spearheaded by organizations already working in local communities, including investing $25 million into violence prevention efforts and $20 million to support victim services in Wisconsin, such as:   

• $6.6 million to the Medical College of Wisconsin’s (MCW) Violence Prevention Project, which is housed in their Comprehensive Injury Center. These funds are being used to support research, data collection, education, and community engagement efforts around violence prevention as a public health issue;    
• $10.4 million also to MCW’s Violence Prevention Project to administer a competitive grant process to support violence prevention project efforts statewide. Ten communities and organizations were selected to receive these funds in June 2023;     
• $8 million to the city of Milwaukee’s Office of Violence Prevention, now the Office of Community Wellness and Safety, to respond to the pandemic-related uptick in violence and trauma with projects that take a public health approach to violence prevention; and    
• $20 million to support VOCA grant recipients, as the state has seen critical cuts to federal VOCA funding over the last several years and an increased need for services.  
  • Gov. Evers later signed 2023 Wisconsin Act 241, which directed $10 million to support violence prevention and crime victim and survivor services, including providing funding for sexual assault victim services, domestic abuse grants, and child advocacy grants.

To continue to build on these efforts to support safer communities, in March 2022, Gov. Evers announced an additional more than $50 million investment of ARPA funds in community safety and crime prevention initiatives, including:  

• Approximately $19 million for a statewide law enforcement grant program that provided an allocation to every local and Tribal law enforcement agency in Wisconsin, enabling agencies to address the unique needs facing their communities, including training, recruitment bonuses, community policing needs, and technology investments;     
• $1 million for the Wisconsin Technical College System to support part-time police academy programs in Wisconsin;     
• Nearly $20 million to Milwaukee County and the city of Milwaukee for criminal justice system initiatives and community safety projects; and    
• More than $16 million toward reducing the pandemic-related backlog of criminal cases statewide. 

Gov. Evers has also proposed commonsense community safety and gun safety measures in all four of the biennial budgets he has introduced to date. In addition to closing the loophole to prevent domestic abusers from possessing firearms, the governor’s 2025-27 Executive Budget proposed the most robust and comprehensive gun safety reform efforts to date, including: 

• Providing ongoing funding to make the Office of Violence Prevention a permanent office in state government;   
• Investing $66 million to support services for crime victims statewide and help critical victim service providers stay afloat after seeing significant recent reductions in federal funding under VOCA;   
• Promoting and supporting the safe storage of firearms to prevent guns from getting into the hands of kids, people who may be at risk of harming themselves, individuals who are prohibited from possessing firearms, and individuals who are a threat to others;   
• Enacting “red flag” laws to give law enforcement and loved ones critical tools to help keep people safe;   
• Creating a new program called the Self-Assigned Firearm Exclusion (SAFE) Program, which will help ensure folks who are in crisis have access to the resources needed to keep themselves and others safe;   
• Requiring violent history checks for most firearm purchases;   
• Requiring a waiting period between firearm purchases and possession; and    
• Banning untraceable guns and certain firearm modification devices.    

STATISTICS ON VIOLENCE AND GUN VIOLENCE IN WISCONSIN 
According to Everytown for Gun Safety, the rate of gun deaths in Wisconsin has increased 16 percent from 2015 to 2024, and in every year since 2019, there have been more mass shootings than days in the year, according to data from the Gun Violence Archive.  

Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that, as of 2020, firearms have been the leading cause of death for kids in America—surpassing car accidents and cancer—with gun death rates in this age group increasing by 106 percent over the last 11 years. Additionally, a report from End Domestic Abuse Wisconsin also showed that Wisconsin saw a record number of domestic violence deaths in 2024, claiming the lives of 99 individuals. According to End Domestic Abuse Wisconsin, of the 99 domestic violence deaths in Wisconsin in 2024, 71 percent were caused by a firearm, and incidents involving a firearm were 12 times more likely to result in death.  

In 2023, there were nearly 47,000 firearm-related deaths in America, with more than half of those deaths occurring by suicide. In Wisconsin, over 50 percent of all suicide deaths are firearm-related. Gun violence does not just affect only the largest cities and urban areas in Wisconsin. According to a recent analysis on Gun Death in Wisconsin, firearm suicide rates have remained higher in rural Wisconsin compared to urban areas, and the majority of firearm deaths in rural areas of Wisconsin are suicide deaths.  As gun violence in particular continues to persist in communities across the state, especially in Wisconsin’s rural areas and communities, a commitment to comprehensive community violence prevention and robust investments in mental and behavioral health services, crime victim services, coupled with commonsense gun safety reform, has never been more important.