Safe, equitable and thriving youth and communities - community safety and youth violence were identified as top health issues for linn county and cedar rapids, iowa between the years of 2015 and 2019

A grassroots movement, the safe, equitable, and thriving taskforce, responded to the death of a young teen in 2015, and published a report outlining factors contributing to youth violence in cedar rapids. In the 2018 linn county community health assessment, community safety emerged as a top health issue, and was prioritized as one of the three top health issues for the community to address in order to achieve a vision for health. Much like the rest of the nation, in cedar rapids and linn county, black youth ages 14-24 are disproportionately affected by youth violence. Racial inequities across educational attainment, income, employment, and neighborhood poverty contribute to the disproportional rates of youth violence. Iowa ranks 2ND highest in the united states in black homicides at a rate of 35.56 per 100,000. In cedar rapids, black, male, youth are victimized by gun violence at a rate 48.9 times that of their white peers. For that reason, black youth are the primary population of focus for the safe, equitable and thriving youth and communities project. The safe, equitable and thriving youth and communities project builds on current violence prevention and community care coordination initiatives within cedar rapids and linn county iowa to address racism and youth violence as a public health crisis. Key components of the project include focusing on two societal level prevention strategies, in combination with a strategy to maintain individual and interpersonal level prevention, while focusing on addressing social determinants of health and health inequities to reduce factors that contribute to youth violence. The project builds upon strong collaborations between community organizations with a shared vision for health. All three strategies are evidence-based practices that reduce youth violence perpet ration and/or victimization or reduce risk factors or increase protective factors for youth violence. The first of two societal level prevention strategies utilizes the evidence-based public health model group violence intervention to create protective environments by performing street outreach and change community norms about violence. Group violence intervention is a model which uses a combination of focused deterrence and comprehensive gun violence reduction strategies. The second societal level prevention strategy focuses on implementing public engagement and public education campaigns to promote social norms that protect against violence and adversity. This strategy builds community connectedness, cohesion, and community resiliency to increase protective factors of violence. The third strategy provides individual and interpersonal evidence-based prevention to at-risk youth and families to lessen immediate and long-term harms of trauma such as violence exposures and prevent future risk of perpetration and victimization of violence. The intended outcomes of all three strategies implemented together are decreases in acceptability of using guns to resolve disputes, number of shots fired, weapons (gun) charges for youth, violent crime rate, firearm-related deaths, and youth homicide. Additionally, increases in utilization of community services among at-risk population, stability of families and individuals, normative beliefs that violence is unacceptable, community engagement and connectedness, awareness of the impact of social determinants of health and racial inequity on violence, and the percentage of cedar rapids citizens reporting an overall feeling of safety are expected as a result of this project. The safe, equitable and thriving youth and communities project incorporates comprehensive evaluation and performance management plan to ensure process and outcome evaluation is implemented to monitor progress toward expected outcom