Innovating Community Based Violence Intervention/Prevention: Establishing a Trauma-Informed Crisis Management System to Reduce Violence

To address high rates of violence in Baltimore City’s East Baltimore area, Living Classrooms Foundation (LCF) will leverage its existing programs, partnerships, and services, and expand upon these to establish a trauma-informed Crisis Intervention Management System that will target underlying factors that contribute to violence in the East Baltimore Communities of McElderry Park and Belair-Edison. The Crisis Intervention Management System will address the immediate needs of those at highest risks of being either a victim of perpetrator of violence, including:  food, housing, employment, and mental health interventions.  This will be accomplished by innovating and strengthening LCF’s current Community-based Violence Intervention programming by expanding the organization’s workforce development interventions into a mobile workforce development team. This will include assessments of individual’s needs conducted by a Licensed Social Worker, providing intensive real-time case management by meeting the individuals where they are (i.e. conducting workshops and assessments in the community during non-traditional hours), and providing Navigators who will assist and connect these high-risk individuals to available resources.  Emerging evidence has shown that strengthening community outreach combined with intensive case management that meets the needs of high-risk individuals may reduce community violence. 

The program goal is to serve 150 individuals over three years and assemble a Crisis Management Team that will work with the two existing Baltimore City Safe Streets violence prevention sites located in the McElderry Park and Belair-Edison communities. The Crisis Management Team will identify individuals and families who are at risk of being affected by violence or who have already been a victim or perpetrator and build out a comprehensive crisis management plan and network of additional resources for them.  In doing so, LCF will enhance the existing Safe Streets model, asset/resource map the region, provide additional staff (Navigators) to connect individuals and families to resources throughout the target area, and draw upon evidence-based practices and successful models, all with the overarching goal of measurably reducing shootings and homicides in East Baltimore.