Terri N. Sullivan - US grants

Project Summary/Abstract Youth violence is a major threat to the health and wellbeing of youths in the U.S. Our project focuses on Richmond, Virginia, a medium-sized city that is ravaged by violence and poverty. In 2014, the rate of homicide among youths was nearly four times the national average. Although prevention science has shown progress in identifying promising youth violence prevention programs that focus on the individual-, family-, or school-levels, progress on community-level interventions has been scarce. Our project involves the implementation of a community level approach employing the Communities That Care prevention system (CTC), enhanced with the Walker-Talker (WT) community outreach program (CTC PLUS). While the CTC builds and cultivates social capital through coalition building and identification and implementation of evidence-based youth violence programs, the WT model will increase community capacity and awareness to make full use of these resources. The overall goal of this project is to implement and evaluate the community-level impact of the CTC PLUS strategy within the context of a multiple-baseline design. Our specific objectives include: a) determine the effectiveness of CTC PLUS on primary youth violence outcomes (e.g., youth homicides and intentional injury rates), b) determine the extent to which CTC PLUS leads to proximal outcomes including decreased neighborhood disorganization, increased numbers of youth served by high quality, evidence-based violence prevention programs, and decreased risk and increased protective/promotive factors associated with youth violence, and c) understand the impact of CTC PLUS on aspects of neighborhood and community capacity associated with youth violence prevention. Three comparable communities will be randomly assigned to receive the intervention at different implementation starting dates. The intervention will begin in the first randomly selected community (Community A), while the other two communities (Communities B and C) serve as controls. The following year, the second randomly selected community (Community B) will begin the intervention (along with the first intervention community), while the third community serves as a control. In years 4 and 5, communities A and B will continue implementing the intervention. This design will provide adequate time (i.e., 3-4 years) for the intervention effect to emerge in Communities A and B. The third community (Community C) will receive training and technical support for implementing the intervention following the last wave of data collection in Year 5 (i.e., representing a no-intervention control community during this funding period). This randomization of multiple elements of the design (i.e., both the order in which the communities receive the intervention and the timing) strengthens this design considerably because it increases the number of possible assignments while maintaining the systematic staggering of the intervention introduction. This provides a basis for conducting parametric analyses and alternative analytic strategies that make fewer assumptions about the data. If proven effective, this innovative intervention will advance the science and practice of youth violence prevention and have significant public health implication.

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.