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HOUSTON — As executive director of the Harris County Domestic Violence Coordinating Council, Barbie Brashear has directly seen how domestic violence programs have helped families.
She also knows the dire consequences of such programs losing funding.
Brashear used her experiences — both personal and professional — to spearhead the Harris County Domestic Violence Coordinating Council program, which she hopes will become a model for cities across Texas and the nation. The program is unique in that it provides money to families affected by domestic violence to pay for a range of expenses like rent, utlity bills and groceries — with no questions asked.
“We’re leading the field and other people are looking at us to see what we’re doing,” Brasher said.
The domestic violence council works alongside the Holistic Assistance Response Team, or HART, and Relentless Interrupters Serving Everyone, known as RISE, two programs that are part of a community safety effort focused in cities and counties that surroundHouston.
HART sends behavioral health specialists to crisis situations, reducing jail time and connecting individuals to care. RISE is a public health initiative that aims to reduce gun violence through community-led interventions, like hospital bed visits for gunshot victims. The Domestic Violence Prevention and Intervention programs focus on directing federal grant funds to survivors and increasing community-based coordination between partners.
The three community safety programs were created in the wake of nationwide protests following the death of George Floyd. The Georgetown Law Center for Innovations in Community Safety recently released a report praising the progress these programs have made in making Harris County and surrounding areas safer with funding, resources, and intervention.
In areas where RISE operates, gun homicide rates have fallen faster than they have in Houston overall. The county’s Domestic Violence Prevention and Intervention programs have helped more than 5,000 survivors. And HART has freed thousands of hours for deputies and EMS to handle emergencies and connected more than 5,000 residents to care.
The programs were at risk of ending due to federal budget cuts growing economic uncertainty has led to a drop in philanthropic giving. Last week, Harris County commissioners gave initial approval to spend $3 million for them using local tax dollars. Final budget approval is expected Thursday. Commissioners are also expected to increase property taxes by 7.6% to help pay for these programs and close a $180 million budget deficit.
“Domestic violence resources have never been resourced properly from the beginning, ever. The demand has always been much higher than available resources,” Brasher said. “[COVID-19] funding got us a little closer, allowed us to invent and support and build some capacity, but it didn’t get all the way where we needed to be, and now those dollars are pulling back.”
Harris County — the state’s most populous with with more than 5 million people — plays a unique role in the Gulf Coast region. Programs started there often spread across county lines. The regional approach helps smaller rural counties that can’t often pay for their own safety net programs, Brashear said. She said without additional support from counties or state lawmakers, the future of many community safety programs in the rural parts of the state is grim.
“It’ll wipe those programs out,” she said. “Especially thinking about the surrounding counties around Harris County because what happens in the domestic violence field is when those families aren’t able to be served in that county, they’re coming into our county to be served because there is nothing for them.”
Abbie Kamin, Harris County’s attorney said the programs are working.
“The issues of domestic violence, gun violence, and mental health are pervasive and impact every corner of Harris County,” said Abbie Kamin, Harris County Attorney. “This is exactly the kind of innovative and data-driven work that we strive for when building the infrastructure that connects people with the resources they need most.”
While these community programs have seen success, funding streams for community safety programs are getting cut from multiple directions at once.
Last year, the Department of Justice terminated 365 previously awarded grants, with about $500 million in promised funds evaporating and affecting more than 550 organizations across 48 states. The Office on Violence Against Women has delayed or withheld money due to new federal cuts and restrictions on grant funding. The DOJ canceled 59 grants under the Victims of Crime Act. The Centers for Disease Control’s Division of Violence Prevention has seen layoffs, making it harder for community programs to connect with the federal government, and COVID-19 funds are simply running out.
“I can’t express enough how dire the situation is right now and how critical it is that we don’t move backward,” Brashear said.
Harris County safety net programs face major cuts
In April 2025, the federal government terminated 365 previously awarded grants, with about $500 million in promised funds evaporating and affecting more than 550 organizations across 48 states.
The White House has proposed another $850 million reduction in Justice Department grantmaking.
The Trump administration’s stated rationale for the cuts and new rules was that the programs were “funding DEI and cultural Marxism” rather than helping keep Americans safe, but a Council on Criminal Justice review found that about 60% of terminated grants made no reference to diversity, equity, race, gender, or related terms in their project descriptions. The council is a nonpartisan group that focuses on criminal justice and public safety.
“Prevention dollars have gone away completely, so prevention efforts aren’t being supported; DEI is definitely not being supported, and there has been an entire shift in priorities,” Brashear said.
The federal cuts are wreaking havoc on community safety programs in Texas.
Brashear said their domestic violence organizations in Harris County and Fort Bend County have lost collectively around $4 million. She said the cuts are leading to fewer staff to run shelters and longer wait times for survivors trying to access services in a county that has the highest domestic violence rate in the state.
“That is years of wisdom and years of experience walking out the door, and the turnover makes it even more expensive for agencies to function,” she said.
The Houston Area Women’s Center Domestic Abuse Response Team, which is on track to help up to 5,000 people this year, is facing operational reductions tied to the federal reconciliation bill, the Houston Chronicle reported earlier this year. Despite additional support from the county, HAWC has said it has been forced to lean more heavily on private fundraising because public funding is in flux.
And the Fort Bend Women’s Center, attributed layoffs at his facility to widespread grant cancellations and cuts from the Trump administration.
Trying to get county support
Harris County residents and advocates at public meetings have pleaded with the commissioners to fund the programs using local tax dollars.
“These are not charitable extras; they are the basic infrastructure people need to live safely and with dignity,” said Swathena Ryan, a worker for a Harris County domestic violence organization, told commissioners on Tuesday.
Commissioner Rodney Ellis, who represents many of the county’s Black and Hispanic neighborhoods, proposed last month investing an additional $3 million in HART, RISE, and the Domestic Violence Prevention and Intervention programs, aiming to make these programs permanent as demand for their services grows with the population. He said the proposed funds will raise the total annual investment in these community safety programs to around $14 million, or nearly 1% of the county’s law enforcement spending.
Of the $3 million, about $1.5 million will expand HART into a 24-hour, seven-days-a-week operation with staff; $600,000 will expand RISE into one additional neighborhood and fully staff its Cloverleaf neighborhood team; and $1 million will sustain domestic violence prevention.
Advocates say the three programs have done enough to earn a permanent place in the budget. HART has freed thousands of hours for deputies and EMS to handle emergencies and connected more than 5,000 residents to care. The neighborhoods where RISE is located experienced a 36% drop in crime — including a 48% drop in family violence and a 34% drop in aggravated robberies — in the first two years after the program was piloted there. The county’s Domestic Violence Prevention and Intervention programs have helped more than 5,000 survivors and their children with resources to safely leave abusive situations and delivered more than 20,000 hours of therapeutic care to 1,000 families.
Ellis said that for Harris County to meet the demands of its growing population, it can’t just prosecute people; it must also try to help them, and that requires funding the systems that support them.
“We hope to make Harris County a perfect model for other people to look at when you talk about community safety, not just in the state but even nationally,” he said.
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