Sergio Diaz knows how to make people feel comfortable. It is a skill he learned from his years as a salesman selling shoes, cellphones and lawn care hardware in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is no longer a salesman, but relating to others is still crucial in Diaz’s work as a gun violence prevention specialist for the Oakland non-profit Youth Alive.
Every day, the 34-year-old goes to trauma centers, like Highland hospital in East Oakland, and meets with people who are recovering after being shot. He talks with them at their bedsides to figure out what they need to redirect them away from retaliation – whether it’s help applying for medical benefits or getting a driver’s license. Beyond his way with words, he says he is able to build relationships with his clients, many of whom are immigrants from Central America, because he understands their circumstances.
Like them, Diaz is all too familiar with violence. Growing up in the East Bay with a family of Salvadoran and Mexican descent, his mother provided the best life she could for him and his siblings, but he kept hanging out in the wrong places and made reckless decisions, he said. When young, Diaz himself was in and out of juvenile hall and lost friends to gun violence. Overcoming those struggles is now his motivation for serving Oakland’s communities who are disproportionately affected by gun violence.
Related: Oakland homicides fall to 25-year low – how did it stem the violence?
“ Sometimes we’re all the positivity a person has while they’re going through the most traumatic experience of their life,” Diaz said.
The work Diaz does is a simple, proven way of reducing gun violence that affects so many in his own community. Despite the success of this work – according to Youth Alive, 96% of the 118 people Diaz and his colleagues served last year have not been re-injured – it’s now in jeopardy. Last year, the Trump administration cut hundreds of millions dollars from violence prevention programs across the US, including Youth Alive. Now, that loss is starting to be felt across California.
Many groups are scaling back programs or laying off workers. Prevention workers say it’s leading to devastating consequences for historically underserved communities, which typically experience higher rates of gun violence and poorer health outcomes, as a result. This is especially true for Latinos, who make up half of all California homicide victims, despite only making up roughly 40% of the state’s population.
Diaz says the uncertainty he and his colleagues face is a little scary. Still, he takes each day as it comes because at the end of the day, he says, people still need help.
He continued: “You meet these people and they finally open up to you and they could confide in you. If I’m gone or if somebody that’s helping them is gone, they gotta start all over too, you know?”
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Last year’s slashes to prevention funding came just as rates of gun violence started to decline after hitting a peak during the pandemic. US cities reported a 21% drop in violent crimes and homicides from 2024 to 2025. Oakland, where Youth Alive is based, announced an historic 22% decline in homicides since last year. In Los Angeles, the police department reported a 19% decrease in the gun homicide rate in 2025.
While the reasons for this decline are complex, intervention workers say they are key pieces of the puzzle. “We contribute greatly to public safety,” said Fernando Rejón, executive director of the LA-based non-profit Urban Peace Institute (UPI).
The 20-year-old organization trains residents who are most likely to be shot or shoot someone else to be violence interrupters or “peacemakers”, many of whom come from Black and Latino communities. UPI relied on consistent federal dollars to fund its programs. The organization lost nearly $2m in Community Violence Intervention and Prevention Initiative funding, and another $1.5m in Department of Justice funding was cut mid-contract. Rejón said the loss of critical programming would be felt throughout the community.
He said: “There could be an increase in violence, there can be more deaths.”
After the cuts, UPI had to lay off staff and was forced to sunset one of its programs, the LA Peacemakers Initiative, which distributes millions of dollars to community violence intervention agencies across the county.
One of those groups was Arise and Go, a Christian faith-based violence prevention organization. Javier Martinez, Arise and Go’s founder, said UPI had previously distributed $310,000 in federal funding to them through the initiative.
The non-profit works primarily in the small, majority-minority neighborhood of Harbor City and the nearby city of Torrance, where Martinez says much of the violence is gang-related.
Arise and Go provides a variety of services, such as gang intervention, biblical counseling and connecting clients with job training and education opportunities. By giving gang members alternate pathways to financially supporting themselves, Martinez says the number of gang-related homicides and shootings will decrease.
The strategy is personal for the 47 year old. He grew up in the Harbor area, and at the age of 11, joined a local gang and was an active member until he was arrested in 2007, weeks before his 30th birthday. He went to prison, but now views his last two years there as an answered prayer.
“I had been to jail before but this time I felt like I was being removed from my environment,” Martinez said. “God was speaking to me and was like, ‘You’re going to have to denounce your old lifestyle and live this new one.’”
After he was released, he worked in gang violence intervention for more than a decade before founding Arise and Go. He hopes he can prevent a new generation from making the same mistakes he did.
But without the funding from UPI’s LA Peacemakers Initiative, Martinez said he had to reduce hours and pay for all staff, including himself. He’s doing what he can to secure new funding, because he says his community can’t afford not to have violence intervention workers on the streets persuading local gang members to put down their guns.
“Even if they’re not involved in the life”, Martinez said, “ everybody knows each other, and in one way or another, everybody’s impacted by that violence.”
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In California’s Central Valley, the state’s agricultural region where Latinos make up more than half of the population, violence intervention groups like Advance Peace – a Richmond, California-based organization that has branches across the state, including in Fresno – – are also struggling as a result of the sudden federal funding cuts.
Advance Peace identifies likely perpetrators of gun violence and enrolls them into an 18-month program that steers them away from destructive decision-making, which includes connecting them with job training, stable housing and healthy food options.
Last April, the Fresno branch lost $2m in federal funding – about half of its annual budget. Alfredo “Speedy” Gonzalez, who had been working for the group, was among staff let go as a result.
He still believes in the non-profit’s work, having witnessed its direct impact on people he knows. Gonzalez was raised in Selma, a small city in Fresno county, by his Mexican parents who worked as day laborers. He joined a local gang and was arrested at 17 years old for committing multiple shootings, which he says was retaliation for a drive-by shooting at his family’s home. He spent 24 years in prison before being paroled in 2018.
Disputes among gang members are still what is fueling the violence he’s seeing in Fresno, he said. Many of these gang members are Black and Hispanic youth from low-income households who, he says, are unable to join local extracurricular programs because of their gang affiliations.
“As soon as I got out, I came out with a plan that I didn’t want no other kid to go through what I had gone through,” Gonzalez said. “I wanted to give kids the opportunity to have something different than the street.”
Gonzalez is continuing his violence interruption work as the executive director of Fresno Barrios Unidos, a grassroots community group, and is still on the streets trying to convince local youth to put down their guns. Every morning, he checks in with the young people he is connected to and sees how they’re doing and what they need.
Whether it’s giving a ride to a barber shop or sharing a meal, Gonzalez says the most important step in violence intervention is making someone feel heard and seen. “ I’d say about 70% of the kids say, ‘No, that’s not what I wanna do with my life,’” he said.
He and his other volunteers are doing this service unpaid, working regular jobs while practicing violence interruption on the side.
Even as Fresno, much like the rest of the country, is experiencing a historically low number of homicides, Gonzalez is fearful of what fewer full-time violence interrupters on the streets and a lack of public investment will mean for the city.
“There’s been enough gun violence since the cuts and if we don’t get ahead of it,” he said. “It will get worse.”
