MCCC OJJDP Children Exposed to Violence

Mountain Comprehensive Care Center, Inc. will develop and implement a Big Sandy Region Violence Prevention Program in the eastern Kentucky counties of Floyd, Johnson, Martin, Magoffin, and Pike counties. In addition to recent community violence, these central Appalachian counties suffer from longstanding socioeconomic, educational, and health challenges including generational poverty, generational substance use, low educational attainment, limited employment opportunities, high rates of child abuse/neglect, high levels of physical/behavioral health issues, and limited resources to address them all. The purpose of this project is to intervene in and prevent individual, family, and community violence, as well as provide treatment and recovery support to children and youth exposed to violence. The program will also provide services to families impacted by violence related to opioid use and other substance use disorders with the goal of improving both family outcomes and community health, wellness, and safety. This project will extend Mountain Comprehensive Care Center’s capacity to provide crisis intervention and supportive services by serving a minimum of 300 high-risk, high-need youth under 18 and their families. Mountain Comprehensive Care Center will partner with local schools, county court services, local police, the regional youth council, and additional community-based programs that support community health and violence prevention. Central features of the project include prevention programming that will be targeted at parents, caregivers and youth, supporting their access to behavioral health programming and needed services to support recovery and healing. The violence prevention program will achieve the following goals: 1) build community infrastructure and capacity to respond to and support children exposed to violence; 2) increase protective factors present in the community to reduce the traumatic impact of youth exposure to violence, and prevent future violence, delinquency, and victimization; and 3) build community capacity to develop and implement prevention and early intervention strategies to support youth exposed to violence to enhance wellness and healing.