141st APHA Annual Meeting

In This section

282199
Violence prevention initiative: A public health approach to reducing violence in milwaukee

Monday, November 4, 2013 : 2:30 PM - 2:50 PM

Staci Young, PhD , Family and Community Medicine, Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, WI
Sara Mishefske , Injury Research Center, Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, WI
John Meurer, MD, MBA , Department of Pediatrics, Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, WI
Shawn Smith , Wisconsin Community Services, Inc., Milwaukee, WI
Brenda Barton , Boys and Girls Clubs of Greater Milwaukee, Milwaukee, WI
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.

Learning Areas:
Conduct evaluation related to programs, research, and other areas of practice
Program planning
Public health or related research

Learning Objectives:
Discuss the funding structure, goals and priority areas for the Violence Prevention Initiative Describe the collaborative of agencies and their key programmatic strategies Explain the evaluation model designed to effectively measure impact Discuss key lessons learned and outcomes to date

Keywords: Community-Based Partnership, Violence Prevention

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Qualified on the content I am responsible for because: I am the co-principal investigator for the Violence Prevention Initiative. I have been the investigator on multiple community-based research projects and conducted evaluation activities for public health related research.
Any relevant financial relationships? No

I agree to comply with the American Public Health Association Conflict of Interest and Commercial Support Guidelines, and to disclose to the participants any off-label or experimental uses of a commercial product or service discussed in my presentation.