While violence affects every sector of society, urban youth and members of racial and ethnic minorities are disproportionately affected. In a national survey, sixty percent of children report an exposure to violence within the past year;nearly two thirds of those children were victimized more than once and almost half were assaulted at least once in the previous year. In 2010, homicide was the second leading cause of death for adolescents and the leading cause of death for African-American male adolescents. Chronic exposure to violence may lead to """"""""childhood toxic stress"""""""" which is associated with disruptions of the developing nervous, cardiovascular, immune, and metabolic systems, and perhaps impairments in learning, behavior, physical health and mental health. Many U.S. communities have created interventions to mitigate youth exposure to violence, but few have included the youth perspective in planning and conducting these strategies. A novel comprehensive approach to prevent youth violence, coordinate the delivery of services to youth exposed to violence, and includes youth input is necessary. In New Haven, CT, the New Haven Community Health Violence Response Group (NHCHVRG), a multidisciplinary community-academic partnership, convened by the New Haven Family Alliance and the Yale Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars Program, is adapting a framework of Community Resilience for Disaster Preparedness to respond to and prevent youth violence. The NHCHVRG recognizes that, much like a natural disaster, violence disrupts the fabric of a community and thus identifying community assets and a community plan prior to violence is essential to responding to and preventing violence and its sequelae. The goal of this proposal, YouthHaven, is to systematically incorporate the perspective, experience, and priorities of youth into the development and initiation of an ongoing city-wide Community Violence Prevention Plan that will be framed as a Community Resilience for Disaster Preparedness Plan. The proposed aims for this application are: (1) to establish a Memorandum of Understanding between New Haven Family Alliance (NHFA) and the Yale University Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars Program (RWJFCSP) to facilitate YouthHaven, (2) to elicit and then incorporate the youth's perspective, experience and priorities about youth violence into the two-day conference (YouthHaven Congress) and into the city-wide Community Violence Prevention Plan which will be framed in a model of Community Resilience for Disaster Preparedness, and (3) to evaluate Youth Haven by measuring: the effects of engagement on participants, outcomes of the youth-derived action items activities, and community level stress, safety and efficacy. Goal: To systematically incorporate the perspective, experience, and priorities of youth into the development and initiation of an ongoing, city-wide Community Violence Prevention Plan that will be framed using a model of Community Resilience for Disaster Preparedness.
To systematically incorporate the perspective, experience, and priorities of youth into the development and initiation of an ongoing, city-wide Community Violence Prevention Plan that will be framed using a model of Community Resilience for Disaster Preparedness.
