The Institute’s mission is to ‘empower youth, schools, families, and other stakeholders to promote the healthy, safe, and otherwise positive development of youth in our defined community from early adolescence through emerging adulthood.’ This mission is pursued through the joint activities of the research core and the outreach and education core. The research core is focused on developing and evaluating effective violence prevention strategies. The outreach and education core supports the research core and respond more broadly to community requests for information, support, technical assistance, and assistance with bringing together stakeholders in a participatory research program. The Institute provides professional development for faculty and education and research experiences for students and community members (see logic model).

The mission, work, and logic model of the center are grounded in an ecological framework (Bronfenbrenner, 1989) that addresses multiple levels of influence on child behavior and developmental outcomes. This model considers the unique contributions of the individual child to their behavior and outcomes (e.g., their individual skills, competencies and characteristics) and describes the child within the context of his or her immediate social relationships, the connections among individuals or groups in the youth’s social networks, aspects of the environment that may affect the child indirectly, and the broader sociocultural context. The Institute will be engaged in activities in all of these areas of influence to promote positive youth development.

Our focus is: “The development of effective prevention programs for children and adolescents in Richmond and similar communities across the country.”

VCU Clark-Hill Institute faculty have an extensive history of developing interventions to increase the skills and competencies of middle school students in handling conflict and in effectively coping with situations that place them at risk for engaging in or being a victim of aggression. We seek to strengthen our empirically-supported child-level interventions by (a) continuing work to understand the effectiveness and relevance of specific skills and competencies to the developmental contexts of urban adolescents; (b) examining promising strategies that may enhance the effectiveness of child-level interventions; (c) expanding intervention efforts to the family and community level; and (d) using community input and direction to inform our research agenda.