WATCH: The Ad Council Highlights Community Violence Intervention in New Firearm Injury Prevention PSAs

Community Violence Intervention (CVI) takes the spotlight in a series of new PSAs from The Ad Council that bring awareness to the life-saving work occurring in cities across the country. The spots are the latest from the organization’s broader “Agree to Agree” youth firearm injury prevention initiative which first launched in 2025.

The PSAs are told from the perspective of community members receiving vital CVI services such as street outreach, counseling, hospital-based violence intervention, victim services, and more. It’s a powerful showing of the scope of work CVI professionals provide to their communities every day in hopes of stopping cycles of violence.

“Through this campaign, we’re shining a light on Community Violence Intervention and its role in helping prevent violence before it happens,” said Michelle Hillman, Chief Campaign and Program Officer at The Ad Council. “We can all agree that everyone deserves to be safe and have the opportunity to thrive, yet too many communities continue to experience the devastating impacts of gun violence.

“It’s an honor to help bring greater visibility, understanding, and national scale to the people and strategies making a difference every day.”

The PSAs will air nationally on television, online, on social media, and in outdoor advertising, with a focus on cities where CVI is most active.

As a companion piece, The Ad Council also released a short documentary film titled Where Peace Lives: Building Safe Communities which provides a more in-depth look at CVI, along with the people and organizations such as Chicago CRED and Cure Violence Global that are dedicated to building safer communities. The film also highlights the sharp drop in homicides the country has seen over the last several years; in 2025, Chicago alone experienced a 30% decrease, the fewest number of murders since 1965.

“We have street outreach and interruption work. We have life coaching, hospital-based violence intervention, peace fellowships, cognitive behavioral therapies that are focused on violence — all of these are working in concert,” said Fatimah Loren Dreier, Executive Director for The Health Alliance for Violence Intervention (HAVI) and the Kaiser Permanente Center for Gun Violence Research and Education. “[The organizations’] strategies are different, but they are all aimed at disrupting cycles of violence and saving lives, and in doing so, transforming whole communities. That’s what the CVI ecosystem is.”