About the Community First-Public Safety (CFPS) City Council Fund
Our community is safer when people are cared for and connected to the resources they need. For years, countless grassroots community leaders and organizations have been doing the work of taking care of people, responding to trauma and preventing or addressing violence in St. Paul, often with little or no financial support. The City of St. Paul’s community-first public safety framework includes prioritizing deep investments in neighborhoods most impacted by historical disinvestment, and that includes taking steps to fund the existing work and expertise in our city that community holds.
Toward this end, the St. Paul City Council is announcing a new set of grants for community-based organizations engaging residents from historically under-resourced areas of the city and/or areas disproportionately impacted by gun violence. The grants will build on and complement community-first public safety investments made in the 2020 budget that funded the Community Ambassadors, Cure Violence, the Healing Streets Project, targeted youth employment, and increased after-school parks & recreation programming.
The City Council repurposed 2021 Community Organizational Partnership Program (COPP) funding in order to provide these grants to organizations that help St. Paul advance its public safety vision, as detailed in City Council Resolution RES 20-1601 that passed in November of 2020.
A total of $100,000 is available to be distributed to community organizations across St. Paul. For this first phase of the program, each grant will be approximately $20,000 to no more than $40,000 to ensure multiple organizations are able to be supported at a meaningful amount. In the future, the Council hopes to be able to increase funding and grow the number of organizations that are supported and the amount they could receive.
The deadline to apply is Wednesday, February 10th by 11:59PM. Funds will be available to awardees starting in February 2021 and must be used by the end of 2021.
If you have any questions about the application or would like materials in another language, please contact COPP@ci.stpaul.mn.us or 651-266-8640.
For translation of the application process and procedure in other languages (Spanish, Hmong and Somali) other than English, please click on the applicable links in menu bar above or scroll down to select the application in your preferred language.