Oakland Youth Violence Prevention, Intervention and Healing

Youth ALIVE!, Oakland’s anchor agency for community-based violence intervention and prevention, seeks funding to expand and coordinate their core Community Violence Intervention programs, in collaboration with the following partners: Oakland Police Department, Oakland Unified School District, Alameda County Probation, Alameda County Emergency Medical Services, Oakland Department of Violence Prevention, Cure Violence and the Health Alliance for Violence Intervention. The four Youth ALIVE! programs seeking funding in this proposal use evidence-based violence prevention and reduction approaches to reduce youth victimization by gang and gun violence, and include: 1) the nation’s first hospital-based violence intervention program, Caught in the Crossfire; 2) Youth ALIVE’s violence interruption team; 3) mentoring case management for youth returning from juvenile hall; and 4) mental health counseling.  Each program focuses  on the lives of extremely vulnerable young people who would otherwise be left on their own to find ways to avoid violence, gang recruitment or affiliation, academic failure and the justice system.

This proposal will expand existing programs and streamline internal and external collaboration in their efforts to serve more youth with more services and the greatest urgency.  The following are key deliverables of this project:

Recruit, hire and train 1 Violence Interrupter as a full-time member of the Violent Interruption team, to prevent escalation into further violence of 21 additional conflicts per year (63 total), employing street outreach and mediation between individual youth, groups and gangs, to resolve at least 75% of these conflicts.
Youth ALIVE! will recruit, hire and train Intervention Specialists  to prevent youth victimization by preventing youth re-victimization (injury recidivism), through urgent intervention and ongoing trauma-informed case management for 20 youth per year (60 total) who are directly injured by gun and/or gang violence.
Additional intervention specialists will work with Pathways to provide alternatives to violence through mentoring case management and school enrollment for 20 youth per year (60 total) who are recently incarcerated and/or gang-involved.
Youth ALIVE! will recruit, hire and train one full-time counselor, to reduce risk behaviors that lead to violence by addressing Post Traumatic Stress Disorder symptoms of 15 youth per year (45 total) through integrationist mental health therapy.