Community Mobilization to Prevent Youth Violence and to Create Safer Communities

Over the past 15 years, considerable advances have been made in our understanding of the risk and protective factors of youth violence and in the availability of effective prevention programs, and we have witnessed a meaningful decline in rates of youth violence.1, 2, 3, 4 Despite this success, youth violence remains a major public health problem that takes a tremendous toll on young people in the U.S. and on their communities. In 2005, over 721,000 youth (aged 10–24 years) sustained violence-related injuries that required emergency department services.5 Further, homicide is the second leading cause of death of young people in the U.S.5 Youth violence negatively affects communities in part by driving up healthcare costs, diminishing property values, disrupting the availability and provision of social services, and reducing educational and employment opportunities.2

Although neighborhood residents, community-based organizations, and businesses are affected by the negative consequences of youth violence, they historically have not been integral partners in designing or implementing youth violence prevention programs nor have they been utilized as agents of change in prevention programs. The importance of engaging, mobilizing, and empowering communities to prevent youth violence is demonstrated by compelling evidence that community cohesion can be protective against crime and violence.2, 6 Further, the engagement and mobilization of community representatives has the advantages of increasing the likelihood that prevention programs will be sensitive to the cultural uniqueness of a community, that community-specific barriers can be identified and addressed early in the prevention process to yield greater success, and that broad community support can be generated to adopt and sustain prevention efforts.7, 8, 9, 10 A community’s willingness to substantially support youth violence prevention programs, especially those initiated by external organizations, may be contingent on having trusted community representatives integrally involved.

Creating communities where youth are safe from violence is a central theme for the CDC Division of Violence Prevention. Accordingly, the empowerment and mobilization of communities and the development of community capacity and competence to successfully prevent youth violence are integral components of our current wave of research and program initiatives. For instance, the ten Academic Centers of Excellence (ACEs) on Youth Violence Prevention (www.cdc.gov/ncipc/res-opps/ACE/ace.htm) are charged with fostering multidisciplinary collaboration and engaging a wide variety of community partners (e.g., health professionals, educators, police, legislators, parents, youth, business leaders, and social service organizations) in youth prevention research and program activities.

They are distinct from traditional research centers because partnerships, community mobilization, and community-based participatory research are key components. Additionally, CDC’s Urban Networks to Increase Thriving Youth through Violence Prevention (UNITY) project (www.preventioninstitute.org/UNITY.html) is targeting the largest cities in the U.S. to partner with and is building a national consortium of key partners to inform and support reframing the public discourse about youth violence. UNITY is developing tools, strategies, and messages to build infrastructure and a broad base of support as well as a national strategy to direct urban planning and action to prevent youth violence.

We have much to understand and learn about ways to incorporate community mobilization into youth violence prevention research and programs and to evaluate the effectiveness of these program components. This supplement to the American Journal of Preventative Medicine represents an important step forward in filling this gap. The rich narratives provided by the authors are crucial first steps in illustrating the challenges and varying potential processes for doing this cutting-edge, essential work. Additionally, the available data demonstrate this investment of time and resources has a beneficial impact.

The articles in this supplement11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23 highlight some important factors for advancing the scientific rigor and for developing process, practice, and evaluation guidelines for community mobilization strategies to prevent youth violence. Reflected in the articles are the varying terms and conceptualizing frameworks that are applied to the partnership, engagement, and mobilization processes of communities to promote change and health.24, 25 Additionally, the articles help to illustrate that communities may progress through stages of development differently, and the partners that are part of the process and the specific short- and long-term goals they are trying to achieve differ from community to community.24, 25

Although this variation provides fertile ground for innovation for a relatively new approach to preventing youth violence, it also gives rise to challenges in systematically and rigorously evaluating this approach and pooling results across communities. The integration and examination of process and outcome measures and both qualitative and quantitative data are necessary to conduct a comprehensive evaluation and to gain a full understanding of the short- and long-term impact of community mobilization to prevent youth violence.

A foundational element of a public health approach to preventing youth violence is surveillance systems that provide information about youth violence-related behavior, injury, and death.26 Surveillance-system data serve as a guide for public health action.27 The data help to define and monitor youth violence by demonstrating the magnitude of the problem, indicating how and where it occurs, and identifying the victims and perpetrators. Additionally, surveillance-system data demonstrate upward and downward trends in youth violence due to natural or unknown forces in the community as well as due to community prevention programs. One could speculate that if communities had ongoing access to fully developed and well-integrated public health youth violence surveillance-system data, the effect of community mobilization activities would be enhanced through a feedback loop. Surveillance systems would allow communities to more easily and rapidly identify who is most at risk and at what time and to appropriately target prevention programs and limited resources. The data would then allow communities to evaluate their particular community mobilization activities in order to know if they resulted in the desired effect or to know if approaches need to be modified or supplemented with other strategies. Linking community surveillance systems to community mobilization may be the next break-through in preventing youth violence and in promoting the safety of communities.