What we do
We work the whole river.
Most violence work happens downstream — pulling people out after they have already gone under. We do that work. But we also go upstream, to the people standing too close to the edge.
Who we serve
Who this is for.
Amparo is for people whose lives have been caught up in violence — and who want a different way to live. The one thing we ask is simple: that some part of you wants help.
Fighting the urge to harm
The anger, the rage, the pull to hurt someone — felt, but not yet acted on. You sit with it, it builds, and you don’t want to be the kind of person who gives in to it.
Already harmed
You’ve done it — once, or many times. You’re not looking to excuse it. You’re looking for a way to not do it again.
Often these are the same person, at different moments. If either one sounds like you, you belong here.
Violence is more than fists, knives, and guns
- Hitting, fighting, and physical force
- Power, control, and domination over someone else
- Sexual harm
- Bullying
- Threats, intimidation, and pressure used to control a person
The form it takes matters less than what’s driving it — and whether you want it to change.
Wherever you are
- Out in the community, living your life right now
- Locked up, inside a jail or prison
- In a job or a life where force is expected — even required. The question isn’t how to put it down; it’s how to keep it from turning into harm you never meant.
- Coming home from a place built on violence — prison, a war zone, or somewhere like it — carrying what it did to you, or what it taught you to become.
We meet people in all of these, and the work crosses each line with them.
We don’t pick sides
Most violence never makes the news. It happens in ordinary lives — at home, at work, at school, in a moment that got away from someone. We’re not against force itself — we’re against harm: violence used to dominate, control, or settle a score, instead of to protect life. So we serve people across every situation it shows up in — ordinary and otherwise, including the ones the world usually sorts into opposing camps:
- Everyday people who have hurt someone they encounter in day-to-day life — at work, at school, or in passing — or are scared they will
- People whose anger boils over at home, behind closed doors, not out on the street
- Partners, parents, and family members trying to break a cycle of harm they’re part of
- Veterans and service members
- Police and others who carry violence as part of the job
- People in gangs or street life
- Young people struggling with anger and lashing out who want to change — always with a parent’s permission
We don’t decide who’s worth helping by who they are or what label they wear — a person is always more than the worst thing they’ve ever done. And almost no one who has caused harm got there without being harmed first; we hold both, and don’t make you choose which to talk about.
Bigger than any one person
Helping one person changes more than one life, so the work reaches past the individual:
- Families — when one person finds another way, the people around them stop living in the aftermath, and the cycle doesn’t get passed down to the kids
- Neighborhoods and communities — every act of violence that doesn’t happen is a community that keeps its people, instead of losing them to a hospital, a grave, or a prison
- The conditions that grow violence — poverty, lack of housing, untreated pain, and the harm prison itself does; we work to change those, not just the people caught in them
- The systems meant to keep us safe — we push them to do less harm and more good, held to the same standard we ask of anyone else
And one person we serve never knows it: the next victim — the one who never gets hurt, because the harm that would have reached them never happens.
What we’re honest about
We can help most people who come to us, but we’re not the whole answer for everyone — and we’d rather tell you the truth than make a promise we can’t keep. For many people, our work and professional treatment run side by side and strengthen each other. For some, treatment has to come first, before our work can do much good — and if that’s you, we’ll say so and help you get there. For the smaller number who need specialized clinical care we don’t provide, we’ll be straight about it and help you find it. And the work only works if you choose it.
We do not turn anyone away. Wherever there is harm, we want to be there.
What the data says
Who needs help most.
When people picture violence, they picture murder. But murder is a tiny slice of it. Look at all violence — shootings, assaults, fights, and harm inside the home — and a clear answer emerges about who needs help. It is exactly the people Amparo is built to serve.
Most violence is not murder
In Texas, aggravated assaults outnumber murders about 53 to 1, and family violence alone harms more than twice as many people as every “serious” violent crime combined. The everyday reality of violence is assaults and harm between people who know each other — not headline shootings.
Age tells two different stories
The deadliest violence — shootings and murder — is mostly young men: half of Austin’s murder suspects are 24 or younger. But assault and family violence spread across a much wider range, roughly 25 to 44. Who is “violent” depends entirely on which violence you mean.
Violence is concentrated, not random
The people most caught up in it are usually already cycling through the justice system — often years of arrests before a serious act of violence — concentrated in a few neighborhoods, and disproportionately young Black and Hispanic men. And most of them were harmed before they harmed.
People age out of violence
Between 40% and 60% of justice-involved young people stop on their own by their late twenties — especially with support. Long sentences don’t speed this up. Steady relationships and a real path home do.
Who needs Amparo most
- Young men at risk of shooting or being shot (18–24). Small in number, but this is where lives are lost — and where reaching one person prevents the next victim.
- Adults caught in assaults and fights (roughly 20–44). The largest group by far — where dysregulation, old trauma, and conflict turn physical.
- People who use violence at home (25–44). Enormous need, squarely in our mission, and served by comparatively few programs. In Travis County alone the DA’s office handles 3,000+ family-violence cases a year.
- Survivors who also carry harm. People who are both victims and responsible for harm — and need a place that can hold both truths at once.
The people at the very center of violence — the deadly kind and the everyday kind — are justice-involved adults coming home to the same neighborhoods and families. Comparatively few programs are built for them. Amparo is.
Download the fact sheet (PDF) ↓ Sources: Texas DPS Crime in Texas (2023–24); NICJR Austin Gun Violence Problem Analysis (2024); Texas Juvenile Justice Department; CDC and Johns Hopkins gun-violence data; Travis County Family Violence Task Force; national age-crime and desistance research. Figures are rounded and reflect reported crime; true totals are higher.
The continuum
Few hold the entire arc. We walk the whole way.
Stop violence far enough up the river and you spare two people at once: the one who would have been harmed, and the one who would have been swept into prison.
Before arrest
Community prevention, and people who recognize their own risk and seek help — where prevention does the most good.
Inside
Structured programming during incarceration, in partnership with TDCJ — reaching people where they are right now.
Reentry
The hard first months home — built to include returns many programs aren’t equipped for, including after a violent offense or a violent prison stay.
In community
Ongoing healing, skills, and real-time interruption — where the change has to hold.
We don’t just try to shut the capacity for violence down — we work to turn it around. Many people who harm are already acting on an instinct to protect — their family, their people, their name. Our work is to repair that instinct and point it back toward protecting life, including their own.
How we understand someone
We don’t begin by asking how bad the harm was. We begin by asking what the violence was for.
Until you understand that, you are managing a person’s behavior. Once you understand it, you can help them change it. Naming what violence was for is not the same as excusing it — an explanation is not a permission slip. We listen for which pattern is doing the work in a person’s life:
Part of that work is helping a person face the wound of having caused harm — what researchers call moral injury — rather than bury it beneath the justifications that made the harm possible. Facing it honestly is what makes the change hold.
Protective or honor-driven
Defending self, family, territory, respect, or loyalty — a protector’s instinct that learned the wrong lessons in a hard place. The clearest fit for the reorientation work: a protector identity to repair, not install.
Retaliatory or cyclical
Violence as the answer to violence — payback for a prior wound, the reprisal that keeps a beef or a feud alive. Interrupting that cycle before the next round — and opening a way out that doesn’t cost someone their standing — is core to the violence-interruption tradition we come from.
Survival, reactive, or trauma-driven
Violence tied to material survival, or broken loose from trauma and overwhelm rather than from any plan. Here the curriculum runs alongside structural support and emotion-regulation work.
When the harm was the point
For a small number, the harm itself was the aim. We will not pretend our approach alone is enough — that need is met with specialized clinical care, arranged honestly, rather than promised away.
How the organization is built
Four functions that feed one another.
Amparo isn’t only a program. It’s built as a self-reinforcing loop — four functions, each one strengthening the reach and the credibility of the others.
Direct Services
The hands-on work with people themselves, across the whole arc — before arrest, inside, through reentry, and back in the community.
- Prevention, intervention & healing — the core curriculum, from pre-arrest through reentry
- One-to-one credible-messenger mentoring and peer support groups
- Workshops and classes in emotional and practical skills
- Community Response — real-time violence interruption, overdose and crisis response
Produces the outcomes everything else is built on — and develops the credible messengers who carry the work.
Research
Building evidence in a thin literature, and measuring our own outcomes honestly.
- Rigorous evaluation of recidivism, desistance, and participant wellbeing
- Participatory research — people with lived experience as co-researchers, not only subjects
- University partnerships
Unlocks evidence-based funding — and is the strongest safeguard against being dismissed as one person’s redemption project.
Education
Training the field, and shifting the public story of who commits violence and why.
- Training for correctional staff, clinicians, clergy, teachers, and reentry workers
- Public education that changes how people think about harm and second chances
- A potential earned-revenue stream through paid trainings
Carries what the work learns out to the people and institutions who can use it.
Advocacy
Changing the policies and the conditions that produce violence in the first place.
- Policy advocacy — sentencing, reentry, housing and employment, and the stigma that blocks help
- Systems change — police oversight, ethical observing, and accountability tables
- Naming state and police violence to the same standard as everyone else
Works on the soil, not only the incident — so individual change can hold and scale.
Each function feeds the next: Direct Services produces outcomes and messengers, Research validates what works, Education spreads it, and Advocacy changes the conditions so it can scale — which strengthens Direct Services again.
The reentry frontier
Built to include the cases most programs aren’t.
Our reentry work is equipped for people coming home after a violent offense, and people coming home after surviving violence inside — a violent or traumatic prison stay. The exclusion these returns run into is mostly policy, not people: violent convictions get carved out of housing, benefits, and program eligibility. The organizations we work alongside don’t turn people away over an offense — what they often lack is the specific capacity to hold what that person is carrying. That is the gap we fill, which makes us a partner rather than a competitor. We hold both harms a person may carry home: the harm they caused, and the harm done to them while they were incarcerated. And across the whole continuum we serve appropriate young people too — always with a parent’s permission.
Safeguards
This work is disciplined, not naive.
- A firewall with law enforcement. No police participation in, presence at, or direction of our work with participants. Nothing about the people we serve, their conflicts, or their communities flows from us to police or prosecutors. We do not feed shared enforcement databases, and what we learn in the field is never recorded where it can be turned back on the person who trusted us with it. That firewall is with law enforcement, not with the city — Austin’s violence prevention work sits in public health, and we partner there wherever the firewall holds.
- Consent armor, renewed at each opening. Before anyone discloses anything, they receive a plain-language explanation of exactly what is and is not confidential — and it is renewed at each new opening: at intake, at each new group, and at the shift from classroom to crisis. Never given once and assumed.
- Crisis routing: mental-health response over law enforcement. When a crisis must be routed outward, the default is mobile mental-health crisis response, not police. Law enforcement is involved only when an imminent, unavoidable risk to life leaves no other option — never as the reflexive first call.
- A shared group covenant. Every support group opens on an explicit, mutual covenant — confidentiality, safety, and the terms of belonging agreed by the group, not imposed on it.
- Engagement is voluntary. We don’t take people on a court mandate alone — a person has to genuinely want the work, because it doesn’t hold otherwise.
- Mandatory reporting, without exception. Suspected child abuse is reported. In Texas, everyone must.
- Clinical and legal infrastructure from the start. A licensed clinical lead, written risk and threat-assessment protocols, qualified counsel, and appropriate insurance precede the first participant.
- Restorative dialogue is partnered out. Survivor-centered dialogue is referred to a survivor-centered partner, so that work stays survivor-led. Participants reach genuine accountability before any referral — never as a means to manufacture it.
- A safety check on everyone. Is anyone in danger now? It sits alongside the work, never buried under it — because protecting people, including the person in front of us, is the point.