Community Building for Violence Intervention and Prevention

• In Event: Lightning Talk: Communities, Neighborhoods, and Crime

Abstract

Community building is examined as a strategy in a violence intervention and prevention initiative in one city where the public health agency is the lead coordinator of the efforts. Traditional notions of community building in criminal justice research and in funding guidelines are often built upon place-based approaches rooted in social disorganization theory. In this city, multiple dimensions of the community building concept are employed, reaching outside geographic locations, institutions, and individuals connected to institutions in non-traditional ways. These dimensions transcending physical space to link within and between individuals, street outreach populations, and non-conventional groups, such as survivors of violence and caregivers for those returning from carceral systems. Collectively and independently, community is built through support circles, activities, and policymaking advocacy. The implementation of community building in this way breaks down borders of geographically-defined communities and activity spaces as well as conventional labels of offender and victim, which better align with the realities of community violence in this city. How this operationalization of community building is theorized to play a role in violence intervention and prevention, the methodological and data analytic approaches to understanding implementation of community building practices, and preliminary findings are summarized.

Authors

• Erika Gebo, Suffolk University

• Nataijah King Whittle, Suffolk University