VCU Healthy Communities for Youth: Evaluation of Violence Prevention Strategies to Prevent and Reduce Community Levels of Youth Violence

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Abstract The goal of this project is to support a National Center of Excellence in Youth Violence Prevention to implement and evaluate a comprehensive prevention strategy to reduce and prevent community rates of youth violence in Richmond, Virginia and similar communities across the United States. The project’s specific objectives are: (1) To implement a comprehensive approach to youth violence prevention at the community-level with the following violence prevention strategies: (a) two complementary participatory action research prevention strategies including Youth Voices, a culturally responsive curriculum for African American adolescents, and the SEED Method, an evidenced-based process where youth and adults join together to identify strategies and develop an action plan to address social and structural conditions that create inequities in positive youth development opportunities, (b) a hospital-based prevention strategy, Emerging Leaders, that offers a brief hospital-based violence intervention followed by 6-months of wrap-around community case management, a firearm safety counseling program, and a psychoeducational workshop series for youth who have experienced an intentional or violence-related injury, and (c) stakeholder education strategies to build funding and resource capacity for youth-serving grassroots organizations through workshops and technical assistance in grant-writing, to expand the Walker-Talker community engagement model to increase community members’ knowledge of and access to positive youth development opportunities, and to offer evidenced-based workshops for organizations to promote youths’ developmental assets; (2) To evaluate the community-level impact of this comprehensive approach through continuous collection of surveillance data on community-level indicators of youth violence exposure using a multiple baseline design in three economically disadvantaged communities; (3) To evaluate the effectiveness of each prevention strategy with this comprehensive approach by assessing their impact on specific risk and protective factors they address; (4) To develop a Youth Advisory Council that will be actively involved in the development, implementation, and evaluation of the prevention strategies, and (5) To mentor and provide training to doctoral-level students, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty in the area of youth violence prevention. The project focuses on three economically disadvantaged communities in the City of Richmond, Virginia that were selected based on community input and review of surveillance data indicating high rates of community youth violence. Youth homicide accounted for the majority of all homicides and intentional injury deaths (96%) between 1999 and 2019 (CDC-WISQARS) – a rate that is nearly two times to 10.5 times greater than the national average (CDC-WISQARS, 2020). Violence in Richmond disproportionately impacts African American youth, and 92% of all youth who died from intentional and violence-related injuries were African American (Bishop & Chapman, 2019). Given these statistics, is essential to identify strategies that prevent and decrease community rates of youth violence in Richmond.