City of Rockford Strategies to Support Children Exposed to Violence Project

Through the support of the FY22 Strategies To Support Children Exposed to Violence Project (CEV), the City of Rockford’s Mayor’s Office of Domestic and Community Violence Prevention (the “MODCVP”) will develop and implement the City of Rockford CEV Project. The purpose of this project is to utilize a coordinated and comprehensive community-based approach to develop strategies that build the capacity of our community to help children exposed to violence and their families by supporting them through their process of healing and resilience building, therefore preventing future juvenile violence and crime.

By establishing a Community Healing Center, a multiagency, multidisciplinary facility, children exposed to violence, and their families can come to receive healing and supportive services that promote trauma recovery, youth development, and violence prevention and interventions. The project will serve those who reside citywide but will be provided in a facility, and additional sub-locations, located in areas of the city identified as underserved and impacted by economic disinvestment and violence, to promote access to healing.

The project will be guided by the community’s input and through the collaboration of multiple community partners, including sub-recipient Boys and Girls Club of Rockford, to deploy prevention and intervention strategies, address risk factors and build upon protective factors to prevent and reduce the impact of exposure to violence on children. The project provides a variety of direct person-to-person outreach strategies to increase awareness and build capacity of families and communities to help better identify and support children exposed to violence.

Through a coordinated and collaborative community effort, the project will remove barriers to accessing services and resources that provide holistic healing to children who have experienced trauma from violence and provide support for their families. The project will combine therapeutic services, mentoring, recreation and navigators in one facility to assist youth and their families with connection to community relevant healing resources, support and services. Community outreach strategies will help to inform our work, increase awareness of the effects of trauma from childhood exposure to violence and the community resources available to heal and create sustained systems change.

By promoting a community that collaborates to support children exposed to violence and their families, and interrupting and mitigating the effects of trauma experienced by children, the project will impact the rate of juvenile crime by addressing a predominate indicator of youth engagement in escalating criminal behavior therefor benefiting all residents of the city of Rockford, IL.