A Connecticut Violence Interruption Group Traded Paperwork for an App. It’s Been Transformational.

On a rainy day in early May, a COMPASS Youth Collaborative van cruises down Wethersfield Avenue in Hartford, Connecticut. The thoroughfare, with its historical ties to the Colt firearms family, is an epicenter for gun violence in the city. From the driver’s seat, Diego Lopez, a Peacebuilder with the violence interruption nonprofit, points out the invisible borders that define life and death for the city’s young people. 

This is the territory of 420 GMS, a loosely organized street crew. A few streets over, it’s the Latin Kings, and further down, Los Solidos — a street gang formed in Hartford in the 1990s that’s experiencing a resurgence today, Lopez says. The groups form fault lines in a landscape dotted with persistent poverty and frequent violence, where teenagers have access to Glocks with switches for automatic fire or assault-style pistols equipped with drum magazines.

Hartford isn’t known nationally as a hotspot of gun violence, but it has one of the highest rates in Connecticut. Though its homicide rate declined from a high of 32 per 100,000 residents in 2022 to 18 in 2024, its rate is still roughly three times the national average. 

“Our worst enemy out here is the high-volume weapons — war weapons,” Lopez, a former Latin Kings member and four-time gunshot survivor who completed a 16-year prison sentence before becoming a violence interrupter more than a decade ago, tells me. “We’re talking young people as young as 14 or 15 years old having access to this stuff. These kids don’t even got access to PlayStations.”

In this high-stakes environment, interrupting violence requires more than just good intentions. It demands precision, consistency, and information. For the team at COMPASS, their most powerful weapon isn’t worn on a vest or carried in a holster. It’s an app on their phone.

It’s called Navi.

COMPASS was established three decades ago — during the early days of widespread internet adoption. For years, the vital work of COMPASS’s violence interrupters, case managers, mentors, and social workers was a whirlwind of paper notes, binders, and memory. A Peacebuilder might have 25 young people on their caseload, each with a complex web of needs, rivalries, court hearings, and appointments. Tracking it all was a nightmare. 

That changed in 2021 when COMPASS decided to build its own case management solution. The organization came up with Navi, a custom, secure, mobile-first platform designed by the Peacebuilders themselves and engineered with the help of a contractor. “I was begging for this for maybe 12 years,” Lopez recalled. He even won an internal competition to name the app.

“If you’re in the middle of a crisis, paperwork becomes the last thing you want to do because you have to go sit down and write,” Jacquelyn Santiago Nazario, the organization’s CEO, said. “Here it’s just, click. There’s less room for error.” The goal was a system that was easy to use on the go, secure and HIPAA-compliant to protect a vulnerable population, and most importantly, useful.

Today, Navi is the digital backbone of COMPASS’s entire operation. It’s a real-time intelligence hub that transforms how Peacebuilders engage with young people at risk of being involved in violence, giving the violence interrupters access to live data wherever they are.

“It’s amazing,” Lopez said. “It tells me everything I need to know in real time. If there’s an update put in there five minutes ago, I’ll be able to go in there and see it.”

This real-time data is the key to navigating often dangerous social dynamics of the street. Before engaging a young person or bringing them to COMPASS’s youth center, a Peacebuilder can check Navi. A “red” safety assessment may, for example, signal an active conflict between the young person and another participant. 

In other words, the app prevents potential eruptions of violence — creating another layer of safety for both Peacebuilders and the young people they work with.

“I’ll be able to look at all youth safety assessments and know if they can be together or not,” Lopez said. “Those are being updated on a constant basis.”

The platform is more than a conflict web or network analysis. It’s a comprehensive support system. Peacebuilders log every interaction, from a missed phone call to a deep conversation on a street corner, contributing to nearly 2,800 notes entered into Navi each month. It helps the Peacebuilders, social workers, and other staff ensure the participants are actually getting what they need.

Peacebuilders can submit “basic needs requests” — say, for a participant who needs deodorant or clean clothes for a job interview — which are immediately routed to a program coordinator who makes sure the need is met. They track “major life events,” both positive and negative. The system then alerts the entire team to provide collective support when a youth is arrested or experiences the death of a loved one, or to celebrate when they land a job. In the end, Navi helps them track participants’ readiness and skills they’ve learned from the organization’s use of cognitive behavioral interventions, education, and support.

Navi also helped COMPASS realize that they needed more Peacebuilders and to reduce the caseload of each person from 25 participants down to between 15 and 18. “We’re high-touch,” said Ayelet Chozick, the director of organizational advancement. “We’d like our Peacebuilders to see you three times a week. We were seeing that they were not being able to see all these kids in this amount of time, and we made the strategic decision to get the funding to add more.”

That data-driven approach helps the team to be relentlessly consistent, Diamond Cooper Jenkins, a COMPASS Peacebuilder, told me. For young people who have been repeatedly let down by the systems and adults in their lives, having a reliable “someone” may be what finally breaks through.

“It’s all about accessibility,” Jenkins said. “If they try to call us, and we don’t come through, then you’re building barriers. If you say you’re going to be there for them, you’ve got to follow through.”

The Navi data doesn’t replace the human touch or the lived experience that defines what credible messengers do, but it does empower the work. It allows the Peacebuilders to focus their energy on building relationships, knowing that logistical details are managed and essential information is logged.

Navi also helps COMPASS comprehensively track the efficacy of their programming, a barrier other grassroots anti-violence programs often struggle with. It’s showing promising results.

According to that data, 79 percent of their roughly 200 participants saw a reduction in their risk levels, and 73 percent reduced their engagement in violence. The recidivism rate for participants under 18 — most of whom have already faced the criminal legal system before they got involved with COMPASS — is just 26 percent, compared to the Connecticut state average of more than 70 percent. For young adults in the program, it’s 20 percent versus the state’s 55 percent. 

In addition to its Peacebuilder street-based outreach program, COMPASS’s hospital-based violence intervention program, which responds to every violent injury of a person under 25 in Hartford, has seen more than 95 percent of its clients avoid returning to the hospital with complications from their original injury and avoid revictimization.

COMPASS’s approach could serve as a model for other violence intervention programs. Santiago Nazario said the organization is exploring ways to share the lessons it’s learned from Navi — and possibly the platform itself — with other organizations.

Their work to prevent violence not only saves lives but also taxpayer dollars. It costs about $12,000 a year to put a participant through the COMPASS program, Chozick said. The cost to incarcerate one person in Connecticut runs over $60,000 a year.

Yet the ground is shifting beneath them. Federal funding for community violence intervention and prevention programs has been slashed since President Donald Trump took office in January, leaving organizations like COMPASS in a precarious position as they await word on whether their grants will be affected. One of the organization’s federal grants is set to expire in September, and after the Trump administration’s cuts, fewer new grants are opening up that COMPASS could apply for.

“To see this work getting cut is devastating,” Santiago Nazario said. “What happens when we can’t serve more kids, or we don’t have enough to support the kids that we have?”

Back in the van, Lopez pulls up to a curb to meet a young man who has experienced a catalogue of challenges, including the loss of two best friends in separate, traumatic events. The losses, less than two years apart, threw him off, he said, and he found himself involved with the wrong people. 

When the Peacebuilders first approached him, the now 18-year-old was skeptical. But their relentless outreach — though it sometimes verged on annoying — eventually won him over.

“They helped me,” he told me. “Two years ago, I really couldn’t see where I would be in the future. Now, a year later, I already know what I’m going to be doing. I already got plans set out.”