City Of Minneapolis GVI To Reduce Group Violence Among Youth and Young Adults

This program aims to support and enhance efforts in more places to help catalyze and further the prevention and response to children’s exposure to violence and youth victimization and violence, especially gun and gang violence, through fully comprehensive approaches to violence and the promotion of well-being for youth.

In response to an epidemic of violence among youth and young adults due to gang and clique activity, the Minneapolis Health Department, Minneapolis Police Department, and other partners propose to replicate the National Network for Safer Families Group Violence Intervention program (GRI). GRI is designed to reduce the involvement of street groups in homicide and gun violence. GRI has repeatedly demonstrated that violence can be dramatically reduced when a partnership of community members, law enforcement, and social service providers directly engages with the small and active number of people involved in street groups and clearly communicates a credible moral message against violence, advance notice about the consequences of future violence, and a sincere offer of help for those who want it.

In Minneapolis, GRI will be implemented in two subregions where violence among youth and young adults is most concentrated. Subregion one, in North Minneapolis, consists of the communities of Camden and Near North. Both have the highest concentration of African Americans in the city and are disproportionally impacted by gang violence. Subregion two, located in South Minneapolis, consists of the East Phillips community and Little Earth, an urban American Indian residential community plagued by chronic group and gang violence.

As a National Forum on Youth Violence Prevention Site, much of Minneapolis’ existing work focuses on promoting healing and increasing the safety, well-being, and healthy development of youth and families as a way to prevent youth violence. This award will allow Minneapolis to incorporate GRI, an evidence-based model used in the Community Violence Prevention Program, as a complementary targeted intervention to prevent, reduce, and sustain reductions in gang and gun violence among youth.
CA/NCF