Chelsea Thrives: OJJDP Expansion Project

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.

The project plan has a pre-established multidisciplinary platform that is building capacity in Chelsea for planning and executing data-driven solutions to enhance community safety and wellness. Through this grant, the collaborative partnership will add capacity building and community-based intervention services to reduce violence among the community’s high-risk young people. Known as Chelsea Thrives and launched in 2014 with funding that the City of Chelsea, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, and leveraged partner resources provided, the project has a 10-year vision to transform the high-crime city to a place where residents feel safe. Since Chelsea Thrives was launched, more than 400 residents and 25 public and private-sector partners have helped improve safety conditions and violence prevention. To reduce demands on the police and criminal justice system, the project model seeks to more effectively apply the full capacities of Chelsea’s human service partners to mitigate critical upstream risk factors that lead to harm, social disorder, victimization, and crime among children, youth, and families.

OJJDP resources will strengthen and extend multidisciplinary programming focusing on four key areas: (1) building community capacity for trauma-informed practices; (2) expanding youth violence prevention programs, such as Overcoming Violence, to be delivered to all 7th grade students; (3) launching parent leadership training and supporting community engagement in support of community safety; and (4) supporting evidence-based crime prevention, intervention and reduction, including an expansion of an intervention model to serve young mothers and unaccompanied Central American minors and the Chelsea Hub and COR, a cross-sector partnership of data-sharing and specialized, collaborative crime reduction strategies led by the Chelsea Police Department.
CA/NCF