Community Resilience Teams: Leveraging Social Cohesion to Address Gun Violence in New Haven Neighborhoods

Background: Between 2000-2010, New Haven experienced high rates of homicide (10/100,000 residents per year), with the annual homicide rate tripling in the past five years. While New Haven experienced a violent crime rate of 4 per 1,000 residents in 2013, certain neighborhoods bore a greater burden, with violent crime rates up to 30 per 1,000 residents. This violence results in chronic community-level trauma and stress, undermining health, capacity, and productivity of these neighborhoods. Methods: Stakeholders from city, community, healthcare, and academic organizations created a partnership to prevent and respond to gun violence. We adapted the RAND Roadmap to Building Community Resilience, a framework to strengthen community resilience in natural disasters, to strengthen community resilience around episodes of gun violence. We developed a local intervention strategy to build community resilience through an iterative process of community engagement, involving 6 small informant groups and targeted assessment surveys of 43 residents. Results: 51% of participants reported having a trusted source of information following an episode of gun violence; most could not identify a trusted neighbor. Data supported a two-pronged strategy as a means of preventing and responding to gun violence: (1) creation and distribution of a Community Resilience Handbook for neighborhood residents to address selected levers of the RAND framework and (2) community organizing in two pilot neighborhoods with high crime rates and low social cohesion. Conclusion: Promoting community resilience by adapting a natural disaster framework is a novel approach to gun violence. This presentation will discuss the collaborative, its challenges and successes.