Youth Empowerment Solutions for Peaceful Communities

Overview

This project is an evaluation of an intervention to involve youth in creating community change for peace promotion and violence prevention. The intervention, Youth Empowerment Solutions for Peaceful Communities (YES), includes three components: youth empowerment activities, neighborhood organization development, and community development projects that involve youth and organizations working together. Hypothesis 1: Efforts to engage youth in the community change process will enhance their attachment to their community, reduce their problem behaviors, and begin to change norms among their peers about community violence and interpersonal problem solving. Hypothesis 2: Efforts to make community-based organizations more youth-friendly and engaging will assist them to be more effective in reaching their community enhancement goals and will expand youth involvement in their mission. Hypothesis 3: Efforts to create more health-enhancing land use (e.g., beautification, community gardens, parks development) will improve social organization (e.g., social capital, social cohesion, and social support), and reduce the level of violent incidents and crime in the community.

The program will focus on youth and neighborhood organizations in one middle-school attendance area. A nearby middle-school attendance area will serve as a comparison community. We will assess change in community norms, fear, social cohesion and social capital using an existing community survey of adults in the two neighborhoods. A similar survey will assess changes in youths' social norms, fears, perceptions of social cohesion and social capital, as well as their violent behavior and ethnic identity and pride. We will also compare the intervention and comparison neighborhoods on several community-level measures including police incident data, hospital injury reports, school suspension data, and ratings of neighborhood qualities (e.g., vacant lots, community gardens, social interaction). The long-term goals of YES are to: 1. modify environmental conditions that contribute to youth violence; 2. promote social norms supportive of community participation and nonviolence; 3. increase perceptions of neighborhood safety among residents; and 4. reduce the incidence of youth violence perpetration and victimization.