More than $32 million was raised for victims in the immediate aftermath of the 1 October mass shooting in 2017, from multimillion-dollar checks from major corporations to thousands of donations as small as $5 on a viral GoFundMe.

But finding funding for a permanent memorial to honor the 58 people killed and hundreds injured during the Route 91 Harvest musical festival has been a challenge. 

The initial price tag for the memorial — first proposed as an infinity-shaped monument with a 58-foot glass tower of light recognizing the people who died in the shooting — was closer to $70 million, but has been whittled down to around $34 million. 

More than 70 community members — EMTs, law enforcement and survivors — went to Carson City last May to ask for funding for the memorial, but were rebuffed. As of last October, only about $4 million for the memorial had been raised.

The funding pace has since picked up. A permanent October 1 Memorial is on track to break ground in October with the goal of opening before the 10th anniversary of the shooting next year, and the organization behind it has now raised $27 million. It will be located on a 2-acre site of the shooting, an open-air events venue owned by MGM Resorts International. 

But memorial construction is still $7 million short, according to the Vegas Strong Fund, a nonprofit founded by members from the gaming industry in the aftermath of the mass shooting. Construction will be able to continue without the additional funds until the last phase of the project. 

"That night was sort of the day that Las Vegas grew up," Jan Jones Blackhurst, the chair of Vegas Strong Fund and former mayor of Las Vegas, said in an interview with The Nevada Independent. In the aftermath, she said Vegas residents came together to support each other in a way she had not seen in the city before. "We're building a memorial to the good it brought out in people." 

Donations include $5 million from the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, $10 million from Clark County, a $5 million pledge from MGM in addition to the donation of the 2-acre memorial site itself, and a $1 million pledge from the Las Vegas Golden Knights Foundation, according to a press release from Vegas Strong Fund. They also received $5 million from concert production company Live Nation. 

Organizers say reasons for the funding gap are hard to pin down, though it's somewhat common for these kinds of memorials to take some time to build. 

A memorial for the victims of the second-deadliest mass shooting in the United States — the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida, that took the lives of 49 people — is expected to finish in the fall of 2027, more than a decade later. A design honoring victims of the 2018 Parkland high school mass shooting in Florida was just chosen last year. A memorial related to the 2017 shooting that killed 26 people in a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, is still in the works as well. 

Several memorials for mass shootings have been completed, including remembrance sites for the Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook and Uvalde shootings. Yet experts say it can be difficult to get the same kind of community buy-in once the immediate shock of the tragedy passes.

"There may be some people who would prefer not to remember and would just prefer to put it behind them," said Stephen Benning, a UNLV psychologist who studied the aftermath of the shooting on the Las Vegas community. "For those people, having a project to donate to isn't going to be as motivating as people who really felt a sense of injury or rupture of the community and view this memorial as a way of helping to put it back together." 

A survivor of the shooting, Karessa Royce, was hit by a bullet that collapsed her lung and broke her collarbone and shoulder. She said the memorial was incredibly important, not just for the families of victims, but for the 22,000 people that attended the festival and for Las Vegas. 

"The hard truth about this is that it can't ignore what happened," Royce said. "People will never be the same as a result of what happened that night, our community will never be the same. We owe it to the families, we owe it to the survivors and the first responders to build this."

Tennille Pereira, former director of the Resiliency & Justice Center who is now executive director of the Vegas Strong Fund, said the heavy nature of the event can pose some challenges to fundraising. However, she said the memorial was a way for survivors, as well as Las Vegas residents, to mend some of the wounds caused by the incident. 

"People have a lot of emotions and you have to make sure that they feel heard and that they see what's going on," Pereira said about making sure that survivors, community members and other stakeholders were involved in the process. "We worked really hard in Vegas to make sure that it was a healing process and it didn't turn ugly." 

Blackhurst added that the memorial was not about remembering the incident itself.

"There was a voice in the community that said, 'Why are you building a memorial to something so tragic?'" Blackhurst said. "It's not a place to remember violence. It's a place to heal, to reflect, to understand and revere the lives that were lost." 

Harriet Senie, an art historian at City College of New York, said memorials are incredibly important in the grieving process for the families of loved ones and the broader community. 

Sometimes, she said the effects on survivors or family members is visible. 

"I've seen people around memorials where I can literally see them breathe easier," Senie said. "They come in there, they're tense and they're weeping … I see them let out a breath like when you're tense and then you're not."