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Mayor Muriel E. Bowser’s nominee to lead a critical D.C. agency focused on reducing gun violence pledged Monday to rebuild public trust with a new approach to its violence prevention program and by strengthening oversight of contractors.

Kwelli Sneed, who has served as the interim director of the Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement for the past 18 months, appeared before the council’s public safety committee as lawmakers consider her nomination to lead the agency permanently. The agency handles the Bowser administration’s violence intervention program, in which community organizations hire “violence interrupters” to try to mitigate street conflicts before they escalate into gunfire.

But the agency is undergoing significant change, necessitating a clear vision and permanent leadership after a year and a half without it, said D.C. Council member Brooke Pinto (D-Ward 2), who has oversight of the agency. ONSE is changing the model of its violence intervention program and rethinking how its effectiveness should be monitored and measured. It’s also emerging from a tumultuous period in which a bribery scandal involving council member Trayon White Sr. (D-Ward 8) and a ONSE contractor who cast a cloud over ONSE.

Sneed — who has a background in human resources and served in senior roles in District government over the past 15 years — said the agency was in a “transitional period” and would be starting the new year with a clean slate.

“My vision for ONSE is for our work to continue to drive down gun violence. Right now we’re seeing a marked reduction that we will build upon,” Sneed said. “If given the opportunity to continue to serve in this role on a permanent basis, I intend to finish the work my team and I started. We are seeing lives change, and we all are committed to this work.”

The agency has been under a microscope after the FBI arrested White in August, accusing him of accepting envelopes with thousands of dollars in cash in exchange for promising to use his influence to try to secure ONSE contracts for an associate. The associate, an FBI informant, was the executive director of a top ONSE contractor, Life Deeds, and has pleaded guilty to fraud and bribery in a separate case. White has pleaded not guilty.

Although there’s no evidence that White succeeded in the alleged pressure campaign, the dual bribery cases involving the council member and the ONSE contractor raised concern among lawmakers about the strength of oversight at the agency.

Sneed sought Monday to firmly separate the allegations involving White and the ONSE contractor from the agency itself, while committing to enhancing transparency and accountability at the agency.

“ONSE has not been indicted,” Sneed said. “The actions that took place were very unfortunate, but this was not an indictment on ONSE; this was not an indictment on its leadership team.”

Sneed is seeking confirmation as the agency is expected to implement significant changes to how grants are doled out to community organizations and how their performance is measured.

A review of the agency’s violence intervention contracts released by the city administrator on Nov. 22 found that recordkeeping at the agency had been shoddy in recent years, sometimes making it difficult to assess how well grantees or contractors performed the work they were paid to do. <a href="https://oca.dc.gov/sites/default/files/dc/sites/oca/release_content/attachments/ONSE%20Preliminary%20Review%20Report%20-%20November%202024_0.pdf" target=_blank>The review</a>, sparked by White’s arrest, concluded that it did not find any “willful wrongdoing” by ONSE employees.

The review, which was done by the Office of Risk Management, found that in the past ONSE gave out numerous sole-source grants without requiring applicants to compete, often without completing any required documentation justifying or explaining those decisions. The agency gave a grant to an organization to handle the monitoring and oversight of the violence intervention work — but the group did a poor job with some responsibilities, failing to check up on the work or approving expenses that should have been prohibited, according to the audit. Sneed said that ONSE will be moving that monitoring work in-house.

The audit also offered a 2022 contract with Life Deeds as an example of questionable contracting practices.

Life Deeds has a mixed contracting history with the District,<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/10/02/life-deeds-allieu-kamara-trayon-white-dc-contracts/" target=_blank> as The Washington Post previously reported</a>. In 2019, the Department of Human Services terminated two of Life Deeds’s contracts involving serving homeless people after finding it falsified background checks of employees. Nevertheless, a contracting officer still gave a sole-source contract to Life Deeds, saying she knew about the DHS contract terminations but did not see it as an issue. Documentation on performance evaluations was also missing, making it difficult to assess whether Life Deeds did the work it was paid for, the report found.

But the audit also gave Sneed and the ONSE leadership team good marks for making improvements on grant management and recordkeeping in recent months. Pinto said ensuring that new guardrails proposed on paper are happening in reality would continue to be her focus.

“Making sure the dollars are going out the door have safeguards in place, are adhered to and that there is a penalty associated with not complying with the conditions of your grant are all going to be important” in oversight, Pinto said.

Pinto also questioned Sneed on Monday about her vision to enhance the violence intervention program.

Sneed said the agency would be hiring case managers who could help people and families affected by gun violence with everything from emergency housing support and job readiness to burial support. She also said ONSE would be shifting its violence intervention program to a ward-based model, rather than a neighborhood model.

Pinto voiced concerns about expanding ONSE’s reach across all wards rather than narrowly tailoring its services to neighborhoods most affected by gun violence, but said she ultimately agreed with Sneed that violence interrupters should be able to roam where they’re most needed.

Still, she questioned whether the agency was drifting from its original mandate — preventing gun violence — in its effort to provide residents with many other services.

“I worry that as we try to meet those very real human needs, we are moving ourselves from the core mission of driving down gun violence and ultimately undermining our ability to be effective,” Pinto said in an interview. “We cannot be all things to all people in any one agency. That has been a concern of mine with ONSE.”

A new set of violence intervention grantees will take over the work on Jan. 1, and applications are under review. Sneed said a big focus will be to enhance communication with community members and introduce the organizations.

Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner Kathy Henderson testified Monday that she believed Sneed was set up to fail at an agency that she believed was failing. Others were open-minded but skeptical. Delonte Gholston, a pastor in Ward 7, said he believed ONSE needed independence from the mayor’s office to be effective.

Ashley Renee Ruff, an advisory neighborhood commissioner in Ward 7, said Bowser should have considered nominating someone from her ward. If ONSE wants to succeed, she said, it needs to do more community outreach and engagement to better understand her neighborhood’s needs.

For those affected by or fearful of gun violence daily, she said, the stakes are high for ONSE. She said her 11-year-old son recently asked her if she could buy him a bulletproof vest to wear while walking on Minnesota Avenue.

“No child should be thinking about that,” she said.

Drake University, BAJMC in magazine journalism; BA in writing

Meagan Flynn covers D.C. government and politics on The Post's Metro team.

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Kwelli Sneed pitches vision for ONSE at confirmation hearing

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