RYSE Youth Center: An integrative model of health and wellness for youth and young adults in West Contra Costa County, California

Young people from Richmond and West Contra Costa County bear the burden of multiple health and social inequities, resulting in disproportionately high rates of homicide, gun violence, incarceration, high school drop out and punitive discipline, unintended or early pregnancy, poverty and unemployment. There are a number local efforts and programs to address the proximate needs and issues of young people who experience the consequences of such inequities. However, efforts to change and address the more complex and distal conditions, and remediate the disproportionate rates of violence and harm among youth are rare. Most strategies that do exist are designed without input and engagement from youth themselves.

The RYSE Youth Center in West Contra Costa County is a new cross-sector effort established to address the multi-level, interrelated factors that inform inequitable rates of violence and harm experienced by young people. Towards this, we employ an overarching public health framework of violence prevention and core tenets of community-based participatory planning, evaluative inquiry, health promotion, and elimination of health disparities/inequities. RYSE's integrative model of health and wellness engages an array of health, arts and recreation, and community building programs which support the holistic health of individual young people and their peer communities, as well their leadership and advocacy capacity to change and transform institutional policies, practices, and paradigms of health and wellness. RYSE identifies itself as a learning organization, and looks to key stakeholders and new audiences for critical and reflexive inquiry that supports an overarching vision of sustainable community system change.