UNITY and the roadmap for urban youth violence prevention

Violence is among the biggest health threats in the nation today, and young people living in urban areas experience some of the worst violence in the country. Cities are working to address this problem, but they are often challenged by a lack of resources and cohesive strategy. Violence is preventable, but its prevention requires a coordinated approach that builds on a combination of community and systemic action along with a focus on family and individual resiliency. The UNITY Roadmap is a tool to help cities assess infrastructure and systems needs and create effective and sustainable youth violence prevention programming by delineating the essential elements of a citywide strategy.

The Roadmap is part of UNITY (Urban Networks to Increase Thriving Youth through violence prevention), cooperative agreement with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and supplemental funders designed to strengthen urban youth violence prevention by building national support and developing strategy and messaging to support effective and sustainable methodologies. It brings together representatives of the nation's 45 largest cities as well as national violence prevention advocates and leaders and young people as part of a National Consortium. In addition, UNITY develops tools and resources and offers training and technical assistance to cities to support local efforts.

This presentation will focus on the Roadmap's nine components and how they can be applied to this effort. They are: political support, policies and plans, organizational structure, resources, evaluation and research, community engagement, communication, prevention programming, and capacity/skills.