PORTSMOUTH — Last school year, a Portsmouth-based community organization mentored up to 100 students considered most at risk for being involved in violent crime.
The Edward Brown Foundation embraced the young people, whose behavioral issues had landed them in alternative school settings, like the students at S. H. Clarke Academy. The foundation began a program where it works to prevent gang violence and provide mentorship and trauma-informed mental health services for those students.
The group’s ability to set up in Portsmouth Public Schools is credited to a state grant awarded by the Portsmouth Police Department. The Edward Brown Foundation is among the nearly two dozen community organizations that received money.
“We want to work with the kids that are giving the problems,” said foundation president George DeGroat.
DeGroat said the program has been successful. His coordinator, Gemayl Johnson, conducts one-on-one sessions with the students, providing mentorship and anger management coaching every school day.
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“I always tell my staff, ‘Let’s build these kids back up.’ A lot of them are broken,” DeGroat said. “Let’s give them more confidence and have them go back to their school where their teachers are like, ‘Hey, he went to the alternative school and now he came back a new student.’ ”
George DeGroat, president and founder of the Edward Brown Foundation, stands for a portrait in Portsmouth on Thursday, Sept. 4, 2025. The Edward Brown Foundation is one of nearly two dozen community organizations that received funding from Portsmouth Police thanks to a state grant focused on violence intervention efforts. (Kendall Warner / The Virginian-Pilot)
The state grant comes from Virginia’s Safer Communities program, which focuses on holistic, community-based strategies that address the root causes of community violence. The funding is included in Virginia’s biennium budget, which specifies Portsmouth, Norfolk and Richmond due to their higher rates of violent crime.
Since fiscal 2024, Portsmouth police received about $5.7 million total, including $2.9 million this fiscal year.
The money is making a difference, according to Portsmouth Police Chief Stephen Jenkins. It aligns with the department’s latest crime-fighting tactic, Portsmouth United — a coalition of city and community leaders working to address crime and gun violence. Jenkins has likened Portsmouth United to a “public safety ecosystem,” where all resources across the city are centralized.
And Jenkins credits the grant with helping reduce the number of homicides. As of Tuesday, Jenkins said the city has had 14 homicides compared with 27 around the end of August last year.
“It’s not time to celebrate, but we definitely can see some reductions that are worth mentioning,” Jenkins said.
Overall, the grant focuses on after-school programs and mentorships, trauma-informed mental health care, credible messengers or violence interrupters and other strategies that help build trust between police and the community. Efforts at this time are focused on investing in target neighborhoods, including Southside Gardens, London Oaks, Craddock, Prentis Park and Dale Homes.
Overall, it helped fund at least 40 different programs across the city, ranging from summer-long to weekend-long trips and camps for youth and educational courses for adults, said Safer Communities Program Manager Chantal Matthews, a Portsmouth native hired in September 2024 using the grant funding.
A bulk of the grant requires the distribution of “microgrants” to community organizations already working to address the root causes of violent crime. Jenkins said about $1.8 million was given to nearly two dozen community groups last fiscal year, including The Edward Brown Foundation, Friends of the Portsmouth Juvenile Court, Give Back 2 Da Block, A Purpose Driven, and Stop the Violence 757.
The department will soon be reviewing applications to distribute another round of grants.
Jenkins said the grant also covered the cost developing an app, to launch in the next month, that will include access and information on all of Portsmouth’s community resources.
Additionally, the department was able to purchase e-bikes for officers, which Jenkins said can improve community engagement compared to only using police vehicles.
Jenkins said the city’s increased coordinated efforts have sparked participation from communities that typically don’t engage with law enforcement. The police department holds community engagement events, called RESET walks, after violence like a homicide. At a recent walk in the London Oaks neighborhood, Jenkins said residents participated for the first time following a shooting in the community.
“I was so elated, because for the first time, we had the community organized as a result of that incident,” Jenkins said. “They’ve taken that onus of now being that initial force multiplier, rather than the police being that.”
Jenkins also said the department is using the grant funding to expand its violence interrupters program by placing one in each target neighborhood. Other partnerships provided a way for teenagers to earn money this summer. Young people were hired to mow lawns for seniors, earning up to $200 a week, Matthews said. If the weather didn’t cooperate, mentors worked with the teens on personal development skills.
This year, more effort will be put toward growing the crisis stabilization program, Matthews said, which allows PPD to cover the costs of temporarily relocating victims of violence to other cities. She cited one successful relocation that resulted in a child thriving in school once the family was relocated to another city in the region.
But the department also wants to establish a bus stop program that would ensure children get on and off the bus safely without any nearby disputes that often happen near bus stops, Matthews explained. It will also allow the department to better engage with adults to assess their community needs.
“We have a city full of people who are just good people,” Matthews said. “A lot of hard working people. And some people who just have never had a chance to see something different.”
Natalie Anderson, 757-732-1133, natalie.anderson@virginiamedia.com
