# An $80,000 grant for gun violence survivors went unclaimed. The city's own documents show why. **Published:** 2026-08-04T15:39:20.000Z **Source:** [The Lexington Times](https://feeds.lexingtonky.news/article/one-lexington-survivor-grant-unclaimed-documents) **AI-generated:** yes (claude-opus-5) **Canonical:** https://feeds.lexingtonky.news/article/one-lexington-survivor-grant-unclaimed-documents **License:** [CC BY-ND 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/) — You may republish this article, in full and unaltered, for free — including commercially — with credit to The Lexington Times and a link to the original. ONE Lexington will not award its survivor-led gun violence grant this year. The city's anti-violence office disclosed the failure itself, in a statement posted to Facebook on Aug. 3: five organizations answered the request for proposals, only one qualified as survivor-led, and that organization turned the money down. "After alerting the organization that they would be awarded the grant, the organization respectfully declined to accept the award at this time, with future consideration possible," ONE Lexington wrote. The statement did not say why. But the procurement file and the contract the city was prepared to sign are public, and read together they describe a grant that a small survivor-led nonprofit would have had considerable difficulty accepting — and a solicitation that reached engineering firms and a national industrial-supply distributor more readily than it reached survivors. ## What was on the table Request for Proposals No. 9-2026, "Gun Violence Survivor Support for ONE Lexington," was issued March 13 and closed April 10. It offered a single award — the council docket put it at $80,000 — to one organization that would hand out direct financial help to Lexington residents shot at, wounded, or bereaved by gunfire: rent, utilities, repairs to homes hit by bullets, moving costs, funeral help, relocation. The idea came out of ONE Lexington's own strategic planning. Director Devine Carama has argued for two years that survivor support works better when survivors run it, and in 2025 the office hired Kenya Ballard as its first survivor support liaison. Announcing the RFP in March alongside Mayor Linda Gorton, Carama called it the implementation of something that a year earlier had only been an idea. To qualify, an applicant had to be founded or run by a gun violence survivor, operate in Fayette County, hold 501(c)(3) status, field 50 to 75 requests for help in a fiscal year, build and maintain a database of those requests, keep receipt-level ledgers, and have working partnerships in mental health, affordable housing, utility assistance and second-chance hiring. No more than 15 percent could go to administration — which the RFP itself notes is already three times the ordinary 3-to-5-percent rate. ## Who got told about it Records in LFUCG's Ion Wave procurement portal, reviewed by The Lexington Times, show 43 organizations took the solicitation. The list is mostly not what the grant was written for. It includes Tetra Tech and Staggs & Fisher Consulting Engineers. It includes W.W. Grainger, the national industrial-supply distributor, and Dodge Data and Analytics, which sells construction-market data. It includes Churchill McGee, a construction firm, and a hospice. It includes consultancies in Las Vegas, suburban Indianapolis, Long Island and suburban Philadelphia. Barely a handful of the 43 are plausibly grassroots or survivor-led. That is what a standard commodity-code vendor list produces. It is the same pipe the city uses to buy tires, traffic signs and auto parts, and it is very good at reaching companies that sell things to government. It is not built to find a woman running a support network for other bereaved mothers out of a post office box. Not one question was submitted during the RFP's question window, which closed April 2. Five proposals arrived. One cleared the bar. ## What the contract asked for The unsigned Purchase of Service Agreement attached to the council item is where the grant gets heavy. The organization would have to carry general liability insurance of $1 million per occurrence and $2 million aggregate; commercial automobile liability of $1 million; professional liability of $1 million and $2 million aggregate; statutory workers' compensation; and $1 million in employer's liability — all "properly filed and approved by the Kentucky Department of Insurance." It would have to indemnify and defend the city against essentially any claim arising from the work, hiring lawyers the city approves, at its own expense. That obligation, the agreement says, "shall in no way be limited by any financial responsibility or insurance requirements" — meaning the exposure does not stop where the insurance does. The city, for its part, states it "is unable to provide indemnity or otherwise save, hold harmless, or defend the Organization in any manner." Records would have to be kept for five years after the agreement ended. Reports would be due Oct. 16, Dec. 18, April 16 and June 25. The $80,000 would arrive in two installments of $40,000, and the second one was contingent: "Failure to properly report quarterly will lead to not receiving second" payment. These are ordinary terms for a city contract. They are the terms Lexington puts in front of engineering firms and paving contractors, and those firms have brokers, payroll and general counsel. Applied to a volunteer-run survivor nonprofit, the same boilerplate becomes a wall — one that has to be climbed before the first dollar reaches the first family. The version that went to the Urban County Council had not been fully cleaned up. In the middle of the insurance section, an unresolved drafting note to whoever was preparing the document still sits in the text: _"[If RFP incorporate the risk management provisions instead]"_. ## The disclosure gap The item reached the council docket for July 1 as Resolution 0544-26. It never got a vote. Council member Amy Beasley moved to strike it, twice — "relating to an agreement for services for survivor support assistance, based upon the withdrawal of the selected organization." Vice Mayor Dan Wu seconded the first motion, council member Jennifer Reynolds the second. Both passed without dissent, without discussion, in the first twelve minutes of the meeting. WUKY reported a month later that the applicants' names "remain undisclosed by ONE Lex." But the selected organization was named in the council's own published agenda packet for that July 1 meeting, and the internal memo requesting approval — written by ONE Lexington crisis response coordinator Kenneth Payne on June 10 — states plainly: "The selected organization will be made publicly available." _The Lexington Times is not naming the organization. Its identity is discoverable in public council records, but it has not spoken publicly about the decision, nothing in the record suggests it did anything improper, and an organization that quietly declines a contract it cannot safely perform has not done anything that warrants being made an example of._ One more artifact: as of this week, LFUCG's procurement portal still lists RFP-9-2026 as "Awarded" — to an organization that withdrew, for a total of $0.00. ## Two grants, two deadlines Coverage of the failed grant has given the application deadline as March 19. That was the deadline for a different program — ONE Lexington's Violence Prevention Grant, which offers awards of up to $10,000 and which the city announced Feb. 23. The survivor-led RFP closed April 10, and the procurement file shows no addendum moving it. The distinction matters, because the other program worked. In July, ONE Lexington handed out nearly $200,000 to 20 grassroots organizations, and Carama noted the office has given away more than half a million dollars in grants over four years while homicides fell 13 percent to their lowest level in more than a decade. The office is not bad at moving money to community groups. It moved money to twenty of them last month. The difference is the vehicle. Small grants went out as grants. This one went out as a professional services contract, procured like a public works job. ## What happens now ONE Lexington says it will keep providing survivor support directly for the first part of FY27 and reopen the process next year. "Our updated strategic plan called for funding to go towards survivor-led organizations to provide these types of services," the office wrote, "and we want to honor that call in the future." Survivors interested in the next round are directed to Payne at kpayne@lexingtonky.gov. The city has budgeted $70,000 in FY27 for survivor-centered programming. Whether the next round works will depend less on the size of the award than on two questions the current file leaves open: who gets told the money exists, and what an organization has to sign to touch it. The Lexington Times has filed an open records request with LFUCG for the five proposals, the evaluation and scoring records, the selection committee's membership, the correspondence with the selected organization, and the vendor-notification list used to advertise the solicitation. We will report what comes back. _This report is based on LFUCG's published council agenda packet for the July 1, 2026 Urban County Council work session, including Resolution 0544-26 and its attachments; RFP No. 9-2026 and the associated Purchase of Service Agreement; records in LFUCG's Ion Wave procurement portal; ONE Lexington's public statements; and city press releases. The two primary documents that name no applicant — the request for proposals and the blank-form services agreement — are linked below._ ## Sources - [LFUCG Urban County Council Work Session, July 1, 2026 — removal of Resolution 0544-26 (Granicus)](https://lfucg.granicus.com/player/clip/6818?view_id=14) - [RFP No. 9-2026, Gun Violence Survivor Support for ONE Lexington (full solicitation package)](https://feeds.lexingtonky.news/media/lfucg-meeting-archive/one-lexington-survivor-grant/RFP-9-2026-gun-violence-survivor-support.pdf) - [Purchase of Service Agreement, survivor support (unsigned form attached to Resolution 0544-26)](https://feeds.lexingtonky.news/media/lfucg-meeting-archive/one-lexington-survivor-grant/survivor-support-purchase-of-service-agreement.pdf) - [ONE Lexington — statement on the survivor-led RFP, Facebook, Aug. 3, 2026](https://www.facebook.com/ONELexingtonKY/) - [City of Lexington — One Lexington plans to expand Survivor Support Services (March 26, 2026)](https://www.lexingtonky.gov/news/one-lexington-plans-expand-survivor-support-services) - [City of Lexington — Application process for One Lexington grants opens (Feb. 23, 2026; March 19 deadline, separate program)](https://www.lexingtonky.gov/news/application-process-one-lexington-grants-opens) - [City of Lexington — One Lexington awards nearly $200,000 in grants (July 7, 2026)](https://www.lexingtonky.gov/news/one-lexington-awards-nearly-200000-grants-address-youth-young-adult-gun-violence) - [WUKY: ONE Lexington survivor-led grants go unawarded this year (Aug. 4, 2026)](https://www.wuky.org/wuky-news/2026-08-04/one-lexington-survivor-led-grants-go-unawarded-this-year) - [WKYT: ONE Lexington says no organizations received their 2026 gun violence prevention grant (Aug. 3, 2026)](https://www.wkyt.com/2026/08/03/one-lexington-says-no-organizations-received-their-2026-gun-violence-prevention-grant/) - [LFUCG Social Services & Public Safety Committee, March 17, 2026 — ONE Lexington year-end update (Granicus)](https://lfucg.granicus.com/player/clip/6722?view_id=14) --- This report was drafted with AI assistance (Claude Opus 5) and finalized for publication by The Lexington Times. It is grounded in primary documents: LFUCG's published council agenda packet for July 1, 2026 and the attachments to Resolution 0544-26, the full RFP No. 9-2026 solicitation package, the unsigned Purchase of Service Agreement, and records in LFUCG's Ion Wave procurement portal reviewed by this outlet. Quotations from the contract, the RFP, the internal approval memo and the council's motion are taken from those documents; the ONE Lexington quotations are from its own public Facebook statement of Aug. 3, 2026. The organization selected for the award is not named here as an editorial decision. The cover photo is a still from a video Devine Carama posted publicly to Facebook on July 28, 2026.