Community violence impacts millions of people every year

This Project Grant award from the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) under the Community-Based Violence Intervention and Prevention Initiative (CFDA 16.045) supports a comprehensive research effort to develop and evaluate a community-centric evaluation framework for community violence intervention (CVI) programs. The $1,642,305 award to the University of California, Davis (UC Davis) aims to: (1) adapt the Integrated PRISM/RE-AIM framework for CVI programs, emphasizing direct engagement of community stakeholder priorities and perspectives; (2) apply this CVI-specific evaluation framework to conduct a multi-site process and pragmatic evaluation of three CVI programs funded under the Office of Justice Programs initiative; and (3) advance a holistic understanding of CVI impacts and driving factors through iterative practitioner-researcher refinement and public dissemination of the adapted evaluation framework.

Additionally, UC Davis has issued a $146,577 sub-award to the University of Illinois Chicago to collaborate on the pre-IRB phase of the research project, which includes co-developing interview protocols and survey instruments for the subsequent evaluation activities in partnership with a community advisory board.

While all communities are affected, the burden is grossly uneven, with black and latine communities shouldering the greatest toll of death, injury, and collateral trauma. This unjust burden is the result of historical and present-day systems of racialized oppression that create and concentrate community conditions that contribute to violence. Community-based violence intervention (CVI) is responsive to this larger context and has become an increasingly popular strategy to violence reduction because of its central focus on community preservation and intensive relationship-based approach to engagement and care. CVI models vary, but each looks to professionals with unwavering commitment to their communities to take the lead in life-sustaining efforts to intervene, prevent violence, and promote healing. The effectiveness of CVI approaches has a growing but complicated basis in evidence. Most CVI evaluation studies have not adequately focused on how these programs function in real-world community settings and too often downplay or exclude the insights, priorities, and perspectives of the individuals and communities with the most to gain from peacebuilding. This has left significant gaps in our understanding of why and for whom these programs work and how to expand and sustain them. The purpose of this project is to fill these myriad practice-to-research gaps by using rigorous implementation science and participatory research principles to collaboratively develop an ecologically informed CVI-specific evaluation frameworkone that operationalizes and evaluates how dynamics within CVI programs, as well as system-level interrelationships among the contexts both internal and external to these programs, influence programmatic uptake, reach, equitable implementation, effectiveness, and sustained use. Specifically, this project will: (1) adapt the integrated prism/RE-aim framework for CVI practitioners, emphasizing direct engagement of community careholder priorities and perspectives; (2) apply this adapted CVI-specific evaluation framework to conduct a multi-site process and pragmatic evaluation of three office of justice programs community-based violence intervention and prevention initiative programs; and (3) advance a holistic understanding of the impacts of CVI, and the factors that drive or hinder success, through iterative practitioner-researcher refinement and public dissemination of the adapted CVI-specific evaluation framework. Findings can be applied broadly to future community-research partnerships designed to empower community careholders and residents to equitably participate and CO-produce evidence of the implementation and effectiveness of community-centered strategies designed to reduce violence and build community health and safety.CA/NCF