In the 1980s, Congress created a fund to help support survivors of violent crime and organizations that assist those survivors without relying on tax dollars. But as last spring’s funding fight in California shows, the set up has been far from stable – with potentially dire consequences for survivors.

It’s no secret that many Americans struggle to pay their rent – but for one group, the stakes are particularly high.

People in the Bay Area need help with housing costs “on a good day,” said Jennifer Dow Rowell, the executive director of the Fremont-based nonprofit Safe Alternatives to Violent Environments (SAVE).

 “And you add on top of that a vulnerable population, like people who have escaped intimate partner violence or trying to escape, and [lost assistance] is catastrophic,” she said. 

There are well established links between housing insecurity and domestic violence. For example, up to 57% of unhoused women report that domestic violence precipitated their homelessness.

Founded in 1976 as a grassroots organization that supports survivors of domestic violence, today SAVE routinely supports survivors by helping them with their housing needs. They can pitch in to help someone cover their rent, fund a lock change on an apartment, or cover an electric bill – all things that can help a survivor escape a dangerous living situation.

“Survivors tell us what they need to move forward, and we support them in doing that, which means we don't say ‘no’ a whole lot,” said Dow Rowell. 

But this past spring, due to forces out of their control, the organization was grappling with the possibility that they would need to leave many survivors without support. Dow Rowell and her staff were facing down a 47.5% reduction to a federal housing grant and a 25% cut to a separate grant, both of which are crucial to SAVE’s work supporting domestic violence survivors. The potential lost funding – worth roughly $400,000 – would have kneecapped their programming, putting very vulnerable people at risk.

“We would have reduced services, and that’s a really hard thing to say,” said Jennifer Dow Rowell.

The funding debacle is thanks to a relatively little known federal law, the Victims of Crime Act (VOCA), which allocates grant money, in recent years to the tune of over a billion dollars, towards rape crisis centers, services for child abuse and human trafficking victims, housing for domestic violence survivors, and more to. VOCA is arguably the backbone of survivor care in the United States – but as this episode shows, it is a flawed funding mechanism.

For California service providers, funding through VOCA was set to plummet from $153.8 million in 2023 to $87 million in 2024, equating to a 44.7% reduction once the money was ready to be distributed by the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services. This translated to an estimated 364,752 fewer survivors receiving services in 2025. 

But luckily, local organizations like Dow Rowell’s were saved from the worst. 

California lawmakers stepped in to provide $103 million in one-time funding to cover the gap following an aggressive outreach and organizing campaign by advocates. Other states, like Maine, also pitched in with funding. But there’s no guarantee that groups like Dow Rowell’s won’t be left in the lurch again, and this is a conversation that is happening in states around the country – with some organizations saying they are in danger of shuttering completely.

How did we get here? And how did this imperfect funding arrangement come to prop up vital survivor services all around the country?

The Crime Victims Fund depends on corporate defendants 

The idea behind the 1984 federal Victims of Crime Act is simple: people who commit crime should pay financial penalties, and that money should go towards survivors of crime. Money is deposited into a fund created by VOCA, the Crime Victims Fund, and some of it is given directly to crime victims and some is given out via grants to organizations like SAVE.

By design, the fund does not tap any tax revenue. Fund money comes from federal criminal fines, penalties, and forfeitures which has proven to be a less than stable source of funds over the years.

“Our funding is reliant on sporadic settlements. We're not able to forecast them,” said Jaime Yahner, the executive director of the National Association of VOCA Assistance Administrators, which works with the state agencies that administer VOCA grants. The current funding scheme meant that the total, end of year fund balance plummeted from a high of $13 billion in FY 2017 to $1 billion in FY 2023. 

In 2000, Congress implemented a cap on the amount of money that could be given out each year in order to temper the fluctuations. The move was aimed at keeping the fund a reliable and stable source of money, but the cap itself has moved around quite a bit. 

In 2024, the cap was set at $1.35 billion, down from $1.9 billion the fiscal year prior – a nearly 30% drop –  hence the threats to SAVE’s grants. And looking further back we see other dramatic highs and lows.

White-collar crimes have been an important source of money over the fund’s lifetime. Between FY 1996 and FY 2004, 45%  of deposits into the fund came from only 12 corporate defendants that paid fines of $100 million or more. In FY 2017, for example, the car maker Volkswagen had to pay $2.8 billion into the fund after it plead guilty to charges stemming from an emissions cheating scandal. 

Simultaneously, we’ve seen a decline in the number of federal corporate prosecutions in the last two decades, according to Public Citizen, the nonprofit consumer advocacy group. The DOJ brought 304 corporate prosecutions in 2000 and 113 in 2023 (though we saw a slight uptick between 2021 and 2023). 

The Justice Department has also increasingly reached for deferred prosecution agreements and non prosecution agreements to resolve criminal misconduct allegations against corporate bad actors. Fines from those agreements did not go towards the Crime Victims Fund until 2021, thanks to a change signed into law by President Biden. 

The Justice Department has also recently come under scrutiny from federal lawmakers who say that the department has re-routed money intended for the Crime Victims Fund elsewhere. 

VOCA has a wide reach

Once Congress sets their yearly cap for VOCA funding, only a portion of it goes directly to crime victims and to service providers. There are carve outs – for example, five percent of the yearly funding is automatically set aside for Tribal victim services. When all the carve outs are complete, the Office of Victims of Crime allocates money to all states that service providers can apply for via grants.

The impact of this grant funding is hard to overstate. Sub-grantees served 9.8 million victims, both new and returning individuals, in FY 2022. The funding touches hundreds of thousands of people a year in California alone. 

According to a letter sent from advocacy groups and service providers to leaders in the California State Legislature, VOCA funding in FY 2021-2022 helped support the following: 354,227 emergency shelter nights for domestic violence survivors and their children, services for 46,461 individuals helped by California’s Rape Crisis Centers, and comprehensive services for 15,156 elder abuse victims, among other efforts.

Crucially, the loss of services does not impact all survivors equally, according to Cynthia Totten, a deputy executive director at Just Detention International Just Detention International is an advocacy group working to end sexual abuse in detention, does not itself use money from VOCA to serve sexual assault survivors – but the incarcerated people they advocate for rely on those services.

“When rape crisis programs and other service providers are experiencing this depletion of VOCA funding … those who are more marginalized tend to be the ones who suffer the most when there's not enough money,” explained Totten.

Organizing in California gets the goods

When groups in California learned that they could expect a 44.7% decline in funding for the coming fiscal year, they did not sit idly by.

Grace Glaser, the public affairs and policy manager for the national sexual violence prevention organization ValorUS, said that once groups learned of the precipitous funding drop in April 2024 there was a flurry of advocacy to get the state to chip in to supplement the funds. (ValorUS, a California-based national organization, is California’s state sexual assault coalition).

Members of the coalition held rallies in different parts of California, set up an email tool that sent some 2,000 emails to elected officials, hosted call in days, sounded the alarm on social media, pitched local outlets about the issue.

“Right before the final budget deal came out, I was sitting in the California Capitol building and the staffer for the Senate Budget (Committee) ran into me and she was like, ‘Oh, are you here to talk to me about VOCA?’ It got to that point where they just recognized who we were and why we were there, which is exactly what we want to have happen,” said Glaser.

The initial ask from the coalition was $200 million in ongoing funding for this issue, which they later dropped to $103 million, adjusting to what they thought was feasible based on the dynamics at play.

When the House and Senate unveiled their final budget bill, it included $103 million in ongoing funding, said Glaser. But when it passed through Governor Gavin Newsom’s office, it was changed to $103 million in one time funding.

Not the victory they were hoping for, but not the worst outcome, either.

Some version of this story may have played out in states around the country, but to Glaser’s knowledge, there is no central entity tracking how much states pitch in to help with funding fluctuations.

“We are not resting:” Service providers, advocates get ready for another cycle

It’s not clear yet how fiscal year 2025 will bode for service providers and survivors who rely on compensation through the Crime Victims Fund.

The Senate Appropriations Committee has proposed a $1.9 billion cap for the coming fiscal year and appropriators on the House side have proposed a $1.5 billion cap. Both up from the $1.35 billion cap imposed this year.

In terms of money going into the fund, fines from two criminal cases – one involving the cryptocurrency giant Binance and another involving British American Tobacco – are slated to replenish the fund (totaling almost $2 billion), but the money is currently held up due to pending lawsuits. 

“Without significant deposits into the [Crime Victims Fund] or having that money freed up, [Office for Victims of Crime’s] ability to fund statutorily mandated and other critical programs in FY 25 would be severely impaired,” Kristina Rose, OVC’s Director, said in September, of the lawsuits.

In Congress, a bipartisan group of lawmakers in the House are spearheading the Crime Victims Fund Stabilization Act, which would direct money collected through the False Claims Act into the fund through fiscal year 2029. It’s similar to the federal legislation passed in 2021 to find more money for the fund, but this time would have a time horizon.

“There is still an understanding that we're not quite out of the woods yet. I think some of our programs are still kind of processing what has happened over the past year, because [it] took a lot out of us,” said Glaser, speaking to Impact Labs in August. It feels like “begging for pennies when it's a survivor who just needs some help.”

In addition to channeling lobbying and advocacy at the federal level, the California coalition will make another funding request of the California Legislature, as they did this past year, according to Glaser. Simultaneously, California recently enacted a bill that would establish a California Crime Victims Fund, similar to the national fund.

Glaser called the bill a very important step in the right direction, “(but) it's going to take time to build up the fund, so that's [why] this big push for some level of a state commitment for the next few years is what we really need.”

Dow Rowell said that SAVE is actively working to diversify where it gets its funding so that it is not so dependent on VOCA in future.

“I think everybody got a moment to breathe, and then it was right back at it,” said Dow Rowell. She, like Glaser, is looking ahead to the next funding cycle when some version of this saga will repeat.

“And so we just keep, you know, one foot in front of the other. But we are not resting.”