The logic model for our proposed center is an application of the ACE framework derived from the prevention research centers’ more general logic model. This model is represented in Figure 1 which uses coordinates to identify specific components (e.g., items labeled “A” refer to ‘Inputs’, and numbers designate specific inputs). These are provided to link descriptions within our narrative to specific aspects of our model. The logic model was designed to address the center’s mission which 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.

A. Inputs
A1. Youth Prevention Priorities. The center’s overall plan is driven by several sources of input. These include a 2001 needs assessment based on interview and focus group data using the Communities That Care model (Hawkins and Catalano, 1992) , a youth prevention needs assessment conducted by Dr. Faye Belgrave in 2004, and a community planning process designed and facilitated by Dr. Kevin Allison in 2004. The resulting comprehensive plan focused on youth violence in addition to adolescents’ sexual health and risks linked to substance use (see Appendix F). The youth violence prevention section of this plan will serve as the primary component of our community mobilization plan which is described in more detail in Section 7 of the narrative. Our work will involve further refinement of this youth prevention plan, including prioritizing strategies and developing a collaborative community mobilization work plan and continued support for the plan’s implementation.

A2. ACE Community Committee: Using Community Input to Shape Our Work. We have convened a Community Advisory Council of diverse stakeholders from the Richmond community (see Appendix G for a list of current members). These include Friends of Prevention (a collaboration of public and private nonprofit prevention service providers, youth advocates, and parents in Richmond), the Community Foundation of Richmond, Richmond Public Schools, Richmond Juvenile Courts, and Richmond Neighborhood Teams representing neighborhood civic associations. In addition, we plan to establish a Youth Council to strengthen the voice of youth in matters of youth development and violence prevention. The center will also draw on the VCU Community Solutions Advisory Group. This group represents broader university efforts to collaborate with the greater Richmond community and will provide a means to obtain input from a broad base of business, philanthropic, and nonprofit groups.

A3. ACE Infrastructure: Establishing In-house Expertise. The merger of two VCU centers that have been involved in youth violence prevention will provide an opportunity to create an enhanced infrastructure (see Section 1 in the narrative). These include the Center for the Study and Prevention of Youth Violence (CSPYV), one of the original ACE developing centers established in 1999, and the Center for Promotion of Positive Youth Development (CPPYD), which has a long history of conducting community-based research on youth violence prevention. As the description in the narrative indicates (Section 5), the new center will be directed by Dr. Albert Farrell, who will also direct the Research Division. Dr. Robert Cohen will be associate director and will oversee the Education and Outreach Division. An executive committee, comprised of Drs. Farrell and Cohen and the four faculty directors of the Surveillance, Training and Mentoring, Communication and Knowledge Dissemination, and Community Mobilization core functions of the center, will work closely with the Community Advisory Council, the Community Liaison and the Youth Council.

A4. Relationships with Key Partners: We seek to access existing resources to broaden the visibility and effectiveness of our work. The center will include several key partners and will build on a range of existing partnerships. We will continue our long history of collaboration with the Richmond Public Schools on school-based research efforts. We will also work with administrative units of key government agencies in Richmond, including the Department of Health, Police Department, Department of Parks and Recreation, Richmond Behavioral Health Authority, and the Richmond Redevelopment and Housing Authority. As part of our pilot efforts we will build on existing relationships with two additional communities: (1) the growing Latino community in Richmond, located primarily on the city’s Southside, and (2) the neighborhoods located in the East End of Richmond.

A5. Motivating Conditions for Developing and Maintaining Relationships. The center has established a strong foundation of collaborative relationships at the local level. For example, CPPYD has been involved in a collaboration with Richmond Public Schools that was initiated by the school administration’s request to develop a violence prevention program for middle school students. The CSPYV has used a common set of trust building principles and skills to establish respectful partnerships at the grass roots, service organization, and policy-making levels. The key ingredients of the approach are: 1) listening and responding to the expressed needs of the community partner, 2) establishing commonly shared goals, expectations, and ground rules, 3) proceeding in an incremental fashion, 4) dealing directly with potential sensitive issues such as control and accountability, and 5) maintaining ongoing communication that includes continuous review and evaluation of actual performance in relation to plans (Friend and Cook, 1990; Israel, et al., 1998; Trickett and Espino, 2004).

B. Activities
B1. Developing a Research Agenda. Two frameworks have guided the center’s research agenda – one methodological, the other conceptual. The methodological framework is our use of an action-research approach in which we have (a) collected relevant information about the problem we are attempting to address; (b) developed interventions based on this information, (c) implemented them; (d) evaluated their effectiveness; (e) revised them based on our evaluation and input from participants; and (f) repeated this process. We are at a point in the process where we have developed interventions that have produced some positive effects, but we believe we now need to collect additional information to improve their effectiveness (i.e., step a). The conceptual framework is our use of an ecological perspective (Bronfenbrenner, 1989) that addresses multiple levels of influence on child behavior and developmental outcomes. Our research agenda attempts to direct intervention efforts across multiple levels. At the child-level, this includes our efforts to refine interventions that increase the skills and competencies of adolescents, and to inform these efforts by research to improve our understanding of their social ecology. At the larger system level, this includes our expansion of intervention efforts to the family and community level, and efforts to examine factors that influence the adoption and dissemination of effective programs. Our research findings, surveillance data, continued learning from other researchers, and inputs from our Community Advisory Council will increasingly shape our research agenda and inform the development of future center research pilots and seed grants.

B2. Developing a Community Mobilization Plan. The activities of the center will be directed at its defined community - individuals in early adolescence through emerging adulthood and their families in Richmond. As previously noted, the five-year research agenda and community mobilization plan will build on existing plans developed by the Richmond Behavioral Health Authority and Friends of Prevention’s Comprehensive Prevention Plan (see Appendix F) with additional input from the Community Advisory Council and the Youth Council. Specific goals and objectives target enhancing youth’s and families’ awareness of resources; enhancing schools’ ability to provide a safe and healthy environment for students through increased student and parent commitment and involvement; and building community capacity for effecting positive change.

C. Core Activities
The core activities of conducting community surveillance, research, education and training, and community mobilization will be implemented in a sequential, interdependent manner in order to optimize readiness for task performance and successful outcomes.
C1. Community Surveillance. The main goal of the surveillance system is to describe and monitor youth violence activities through continuous gathering, analysis, and interpretation of data on youth violence activities in Richmond. This system will focus on multiple indicators of violence for youth and children under age 24 within Richmond. The surveillance system will be designed to effectively disseminate information through multiple mechanisms to assist policy makers, program planners, and researchers designing prevention programs.

C2. Conduct Research. Our research agenda calls for a series of interrelated studies designed to advance our mission of developing more effective interventions to reduce violence within our target population. Each study is designed to build upon previous studies within the plan (see Figure 2 in the narrative). In Year 1, we will begin a core study examining the effectiveness of an expressive writing intervention to support youth coping with violence exposure and reduce aggressive responses to provocation (Core Study 1: Expressive Writing; Kliewer). We will also begin Study 3 (Risk & Protective Factors; Farrell) which examines the influence of various social information processing factors and other risk and protective factors on adolescents’ use of aggression versus prosocial behavior in problem situations. A related sequence of studies examining violence in dating or intimate partner relations will also be initiated (Study 4: Qualitative Dating Violence, Sullivan; and Study 5: Interpersonal Violence Risk, Masho). In Year 2, we will begin a second core study (Core Study 2: Improving Prevention Relevance; Farrell) that includes a qualitative study to improve the relevance of our current middle school violence prevention curriculum (RIPP). Each study will guide revisions to the RIPP intervention, which will then be evaluated in a randomized trial. At the community and policy level, we will examine a community-based strategy for reestablishing community social capital as a means of reducing youth violence (Study 6: Social Capital; Allison). Our research agenda also includes research to improve our understanding of structural barriers and supports to community-level intervention (Study 7: Barriers & Supports; Allison; and Study 8: Dissemination; Meyer).

C3. Build Capacity. Our capacity-building efforts will target individuals in the university and in the community. We will provide students with training in community-based research practices and the design, implementation, and evaluation of youth prevention programming. Our community efforts provide grass roots community leaders and community members with access to surveillance data and information about best practices in youth violence prevention and youth development.

D. Outputs
D1. Enhanced Prevention Capacity. We anticipate that one of the outputs of our efforts will be enhanced prevention capacity in the Richmond community. This will occur as a result of implementing prevention programs that have been strengthened by our research findings and found to be effective. In addition, because of our knowledge transfer efforts, local policy makers and prevention service providers will have an expanded awareness and knowledge of prevention research and greater ability to identify and use empirically-supported preventive interventions.

D2. Knowledge Transfer. Our knowledge transfer activities are expected to increase prevention service providers’ knowledge of best practices in youth violence prevention and support community residents in accessing useful information on research by disseminating relevant information in user-friendly formats to practitioners and community stakeholder groups. Knowledge transfer activities will also support center researchers in publishing their work and providing access to information from our surveillance core. Data will be disseminated through fact sheets, in an annual report presented to the community within our community conference, and through web-based data resources.

D3. Training and Technical Assistance. Our education and outreach efforts will provide graduate and undergraduate students and practitioners with research and service training opportunities that increase the number of social scientists and youth service providers who support the development and dissemination of empirically supported best practices in youth violence prevention. Our education outreach efforts with the community will also result in increased capacity within the community to utilize research in their planning and advocacy work.

E. Outcomes
E1. Improved Practice and Policy. Local public and private youth service providers will gain exposure to and competence in providing empirically supported prevention interventions. Government and civic leadership will work more collaboratively on policy that targets prevention resources and empirically supported prevention activities to areas of need identified by surveillance.

E2. Reduction of Risk Factors/Increase in Protective Factors and

E3. Reduction of Local Youth Violence. If our overall efforts are successful, we should observe reductions in levels of youth violence. These outcomes will be initially limited to participants in the interventions implemented as part of our research efforts (e.g., Core Studies 1 and 2), but, as we integrate research capacity into our broader community planning, we should see broader community reductions in youth violence, first in communities targeted by our pilot efforts (i.e., the East End community and Latino communities located on Richmond’s Southside) and then within the broader Richmond community. These changes will be assessed through our ongoing surveillance activities.

Contextual Conditions
The city of Richmond has several notable economic, social, political, and programmatic forces that are likely to impact youth development and violence prevention efforts (see section on Defined Community in Section 5 of the narrative). Examples include Richmond’s historically high incidence of violence as reflected in its ranking within the top 10 most violent cities in the U.S. based on FBI violent crime statistics; the high percentage of youth living in poverty; and a disproportionate degree of high density public housing that does not promote a positive sense of community. These factors impact planning in each of the center’s core functions. For example, the research agenda includes several qualitative studies designed to improve our understanding of contextual factors that may influence the effectiveness of intervention efforts.

Expanded Resources and Recognition
Recognizing that funding from the CDC Academic Centers of Excellence program is intended primarily for capacity building, the center has begun to work on securing additional resources. The center has received funding from public and private sources to support training, research, technical assistance, and program development activities related to youth development and violence prevention.

Evaluation
The success of our efforts will be evaluated through an ongoing performance tracking system and external review. This includes internal review and independent audit by an external evaluator to raise our level of accountability.