Violence prevention initiative: A public health approach to reducing violence in milwaukee

The Medical College of Wisconsin's Violence Prevention Initiative (VPI) is a broad community-based partnership featuring four community partnership teams, comprised of 29 different organizations. Using a public health and asset-based approach, our common goals are to decrease violence in Milwaukee neighborhoods and strengthen community capacity to prevent future violence. The VPI is guided by a logic model to connect program activities with specific long-term, intermediate and short-term outcomes. Partnership teams are led by Wisconsin Community Services, United Neighborhood Centers of Milwaukee, Milwaukee Public Schools, and the Boys and Girls Clubs of Greater Milwaukee. Each community partnership team builds on their strengths and expertise to develop unique evidence-informed strategies that contribute to a city-wide, multifaceted approach. While there are other large youth violence prevention programs in the U.S. that involve strong community-academic partnerships with rigorous evaluation designs, the VPI is the only privately-funded major initiative. During the past three years, approximately 197,000 people have been reached through VPI trainings, conferences, research, collaborations, community events, services, partnership teams and dissemination efforts. The VPI recognizes the myriad of factors that can impact health. Current partnership programming and collaborative efforts address environmental changes, increased employment skills and job placements, increased educational achievement, access to healthy foods, promoting healthy relationships, and physical activity. The evaluation plan includes process measures and tracks individual short-term outcomes in a non-experimental design to assist community partners with on-going program decision making, as well as a quasi-experimental cross-site evaluation designed to capture intermediate and long-term changes influenced by the VPI.