SYNCing up for Safety!

Participants enjoyed keynote presentations from distinguished speakers, including:

• Dr. Noni K. Gaylord-Harden, Professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Texas A&M University and Director of the Youth Rising Research Lab.
• Maestro Jerry Tello of the National Compadres Network.
• Dr. Larry D. Brown, Jr., Associate Director of the Community Health and Violence Prevention Services Division at Harris County Public Health.

The event also featured roundtable discussions on sustainability, co-designing policy and program work with young people, narrative and storytelling, relationship building, and small-group coaching led by our core partners. As participants shared challenges and traumas experienced in communities as well as connected threads of social justice and cultural practices, the role of collective action served as a reminder of the learning community’s synchronized strength.

Above all, the convening highlighted the interconnected nature of preventing violence, working toward community safety, and ensuring that health equity and racial justice are in every step of the approach. While we specifically focused on community violence, we also recognize that this is one single strand in a movement that includes firearm violence, structural and systemic violence, intimate-partner and gender-based violence, and other forms of violence. It’s important that we continue to connect the dots between all forms of violence and identify and address the deeply embedded root causes that make our communities vulnerable to harm. 

 
Join this session to learn about the principles, strategies, and recommendations for uplifting contextual and experiential evidence in decision making. Building off of the CDC's Framework for Thinking about Evidence, PI’s Uplifting Contextual and Experiential Evidence project seeks to elevate and integrate Contextual (i.e., measurable factors in a community) and Experiential (i.e., the collective experience and expertise of community residents and practitioners, or lived experience) Evidence alongside Best Available Evidence (i.e., peer-reviews, published scientific literature) for evidence-informed decision-making. This project complements Prevention Institute’s Health Equity in Practice (HEiP) modules to embed health equity and racial justice in community safety work to support local government partners preventing multiple forms of violence. Partners from different sectors, e.g., government, community-based organizations, philanthropic, and others, may find added value in attending this session together.
 
To learn more about the vital public health approach to preventing violence, please check out the following resources:

• About The Public Health Approach to Violence Prevention from the CDC Division of Violence Prevention
• Community Violence Prevention, a video from CDC
• Community Safety Realized: Public Health Pathways to Preventing Violence: Community Safety Realized, developed by Prevention Institute and Big Cities Health Coalition, describes how the science and practice of public health and the values of equity and justice can shape community-driven, multi-sector approaches to safety.

This project is supported by Cooperative Agreement No. NU38OT000305 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the Department of Health and Human Services or the CDC.