Clark-Hill Institute for Positive Youth Development Community Mobilization Plan

The Clark-Hill Institute for Positive Youth Development seeks to support positive changes for youth in Richmond through its community mobilization efforts. These activities are designed to support and enhance community efforts that reduce risk for engaging in, witnessing or being a victim of youth violence. Our efforts seek to build on and enhance existing community capacity. Our Community Mobilization Plan is centered on six core activities:

1.Supporting Collaborative-Coordinated Efforts to Reduce Youth Risk

For this effort, we work with a range of community partners to understand and review their current plans and activities that explicitly address youth violence or are designed to impact risk factors linked to youth violence. We work with community partners in conducting this review and support the examination of opportunities for coordination and collaboration and explore the implications and potential new work based on our integrated understanding of the multiple ongoing efforts that address youth risk

2.Clarifying and Addressing Barriers to Support of Positive Youth Development

Through our qualitative study of policy makers in Richmond and two other southern cities, we seek to better understand the factors that support and impede community level efforts to reduce risk relevant to youth violence. Through sharing results of the findings with local policy makers and exploring their implications for future action we hope to support efforts to reduce barriers and enhance the support of youth risk reduction.

3.Strengthening and Informing Institute Activity

Through work with our Community Advisory Council, we work to inform, strengthen and initiate research, surveillance, education, training, dissemination, and community mobilization activities that support the development of effective prevention programs, strategies and activities that reduce youth risk in our target communities and schools and that also support the growth of our prevention science knowledge base.

4.Providing Support and Technical Assistance to Community Partners to Enhance Capacity

The Institute works with community partners to bring or access expertise and technical assistance to support their efforts that work to reduce risk for youth.

5. Providing Training to Support Partner Efforts
The Institute works with community partners to identify training needs and to bring or access relevant education and training resources to support their efforts to reduce risk for youth.

6. Identifying Effective Community Strategies to Enhance Positive Youth Development

Through collaborative efforts with our community partners, we seek to design, implement, and evaluate community-level strategies that support the reduction of youth risk building on community assets and focusing on enhancing access to positive youth development opportunities and resources (Social Capital Project).

We believe that aspects of these efforts and activities work to influence local youth policy (Activities, 1, 2, 3, and 4) , enhance youth relevant services and intervention (Activities 1,2,3,4,5, and 6) and work to alter community norms and beliefs relevant to youth violence (Activity 6). In turn these community changes in local policy, the availability, quality and effectiveness of services and intervention and positive changes in community norms and beliefs will reduce risk and lower youth violence among youth in the City of Richmond. It is notable that our intended population, youth in the city of Richmond, is large. Although we anticipate that our community mobilization efforts will, over time lead to larger community change relevant to youth risk and actual violence. We will work to monitor the effectiveness of our activities by judging the impact of our multiple efforts on the youth and families that participate in the individual components of our mobilization efforts, examining the appropriate and relevant scope, target and scale of the activity, and through use of our surveillance data. Our mobilization plan is illustrated in the attached figure.