What happens when “evidence-based” becomes a survival strategy?

CVI organizations across the country are being asked to prove their value at the exact moment they are fighting for resources to survive. Funding is shrinking. Organizations are competing for fewer dollars. Frontline workers are being asked to do more with less. And scarcity creates its own kind of pressure: Prove that your model works. Prove that your organization works. Prove that you are “evidence-based.” Prove that you deserve to survive.

But there is a problem when a field built on community, relationships, and collective safety is pushed into a competition for legitimacy. We start asking which organization has the evidence instead of asking why communities experiencing violence remain structurally under-resourced. We start debating which model works instead of asking what conditions allow that work to succeed—or what conditions continue to produce violence in the first place. And we risk allowing “evidence-based” to become another gatekeeper in the fight for resources.

That is the conversation at the center of The New Hood’s new community brief, I Gave You Power.

This is not an argument against evidence. Evidence matters. Research matters. Evaluation matters. But evidence should help us learn, question, adapt, and improve. It should not determine whose knowledge is legitimate, whose work has value, or which communities are worthy of investment. Evidence should expand our imagination, not constrain it.

Read I Gave You Power: A Community Brief for the CVI Field.