This December, we four are filled with hope for 2025. That hope stems from the reflections we have on our past eight years of listening, learning, organizing and advocacy.

Eight winters ago, we met with representatives of then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration to speak to the paucity of public municipal funds directed toward gun violence prevention. In 2017, the city’s structure of addressing gun violence was to place it in a small corner of the general department of all violence prevention, which allocated far more resources to preventing bullying than to averting gun deaths.

Two of us remember that initial 2017 meeting with aldermen on the Committee on Public Safety and the mayor’s representatives. Having done our research on best practices of cities that made major strides in preventing gun violence — larger cities such as Los Angeles and smaller Midwestern peers such as Milwaukee — we shared that what Chicago needed was a major investment. Namely, $100 million in every year’s budget. Since the city’s specific spending on gun violence prevention at that time was in the six figures, we shared that our goal for the 2018 budget was an incremental first step: $10 million to create and fund an Office of Gun Violence Reduction.

That year’s allocation? Just $1.2 million, a far cry from the $10 million for which we asked or the $100 million Chicago needed to tackle the menacing, lethal, defining issue of gun violence. We took time to celebrate the increase and then got back to work.  

Eight years later, and working now with the expanded faith leaders coalition and Live Free Illinois, we were gratified to see a Chicago mayor introduce a 2025 budget investment of more than $100 million in community safety. It may have taken us eight years to get to our initial ask, but we feel the need to celebrate that our city has reached this important milestone of commitment.

This municipal investment in community safety makes a real difference in people’s lives. It supports many initiatives for which we have advocated the past eight years: emergency funds and legal services for survivors, youth intervention and diversion programs, a Community Safety Coordination Center (CSCC), workforce development programs and much more. The mayor’s budget recommendation allocated $15 million for essential community violence interventions. When it comes to investing in community safety and seriously and centrally addressing the issue of gun violence, Chicago has come a long way.

This, we need to celebrate.

And as we turn the calendar page to January, we know that in 2025, there is still more for which we need to fight and to advocate in order to ensure a secure future for our city.

To begin with, we know that the mayor’s original proposed budget — including the $100 million he hoped to invest in community safety — was altered and cut in many places. As the final details of the budget continue to emerge, we imagine the city has not yet reached this important threshold of investment in community safety.

Furthermore, given the machinations and strife of this year’s budget battles, we know that few of Chicago’s communal investments are secure, unless they are by long-term contract or ordinance. Therefore, while we applaud more than $6 million to fund the central CSCC, we know that the CSCC can disappear overnight, either through lack of funding or mayoral whim. Until and unless an ordinance establishes a central body to serve as an Office of Gun Violence Reduction, this year’s plans can become next year’s broken promises.

In addition, this proposed budget for community safety casts a broad net, understandably. It includes everything from entry programs, which we support, to needed funds for matters related to domestic and intimate partner violence. However, putting all these safety issues in one big budgetary basket disguises the fact that the city is still behind in contributing its fair share to the larger civic project of combating gun violence.

Lastly, our nation is entering a time of great uncertainty. Given the new administration’s targeting of Chicago, we believe now is the time to invest seriously in public safety. Since so much is unforeseeable, we must do our part to ensure long-term, sustained city investment in reducing gun violence.

The cusp of a new calendar year offers us an opportunity both to be grateful for the gifts of the past and to set resolutions for the future. Part of those gifts from the past is the inheritance from a long line of people who fought and continue to fight for Chicago. Those who led Operation Breadbasket and the original Rainbow Coalition in the 1960s learned the system is not interested in prevention and protection of the most vulnerable but rather protection of positions. That is why our city needs people to keep fighting to tear down the walls and repair the breach.

We are called to build a new model of security, one that casts aside the architectural drawings of empire engineers of the old system. The investment of the city in this project matters; creating the proper, enduring, new, community-led structure will matter even more. Thus, even as we celebrate reaching a milestone marker in city funds invested in preventing gun violence, may we as a city resolve ourselves, for 2025, to take the next step and ensure not only greater funding but also the security of an Office of Gun Violence Reduction — for a safer future for all. 

Chicago faith leaders Rabbi Seth Limmer, the Rev. Otis Moss III, the Rev. Ciera Bates-Chamberlain and the Rev. Michael Pfleger joined the Tribune’s opinion section in summer 2022 for a series of columns on potential solutions to Chicago’s chronic gun violence problem. The column continues on an occasional basis.

Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email letters@chicagotribune.com.