Youth Violence Antidote

This project is part of the Center for Teen Empowerment’s wider effort to expand into two other Rochester neighborhoods. Teen Empowerment (TE) has been active in the Southwest for more than ten years and has recently expanded to the Eastside (Beechwood/MarketView Heights) but is in search of a brick-and-mortar in the neighborhood. There are plans of further expanding into the Northwest (Dewey/Driving Park).

TE utilizes neighborhood-based organizing to create change at individual, community, and systemic levels, and through this organizing, addresses the root causes of youth violence. TE has been assessing individual change within youth organizers (YO’s) to understand how the program impacts youth staff, but has not yet developed neighborhood-level indicators.

The research aspect of this project is to develop and measure community-level indicators of youth violence through a participatory process. On The Ground Research will work with TE Staff and Youth Organizers to together come up with appropriate indicators of youth violence that can be tracked over time to understand TE’s impact on youth violence. Once the measures are developed, On The Ground and TE will initiate data collection and analysis.