OSHN Community Violence Intervention Expansion Project

The Office for Safe and Healthy Neighborhoods (OSHN) seeks to strengthen its current community violence intervention efforts at both the macro level (citywide) and the micro level (neighborhood level) by utilizing grant funds to (1) expand the number of its current Cure Violence Intervention and Interruption sites from 5 to 6, expanding into the Newburg neighborhood; (2) expand its in-house outreach case management team by one staff to support long-term intervention services in the Newburg neighborhood; (3) provide enhanced training on restorative justice facilitation principles to over 75 outreach workers across the city; and (4) consolidate, focus and align many of its current citywide gun violence reduction strategies and programs into a scaled down neighborhood approach as a pilot project to better understand how Louisville can shift from a siloed, city-wide violence reduction effort to a more coordinated, comprehensive, micro-geographical approach, where our consortium of strategies can be more effective, efficient and complimentary of one another, while focusing on specific data-identified hotspots for gun violence.

The project will focus its efforts on intervening with those individuals driving gun violence (primarily ages 14 -24) as determined by their risk to be involved in violence either a perpetrator or victim, supporting those impacted by gun violence and building community voice and ownership in developing neighborhood-level solutions to gun violence. The Louisville Newburg neighborhood will serve as the pilot geographical neighborhood. The overarching goal of the project is to implement, test and sustain a comprehensive program model designed to reduce community level gun violence through a collective impact approach, where the project depends on a diverse group of stakeholders working together, not by requiring that all participants do the same thing, but by encouraging each participant to undertake the specific set of activities at which it excels in a way that supports and is coordinated with the actions of others. The power of the collective comes not from the sheer number of participants or the uniformity of their efforts, but from the coordination of their differentiated activities through a mutually reinforcing plan of action. Expected outcome is reduced levels of gun violence due to greater facilitation of behavior change, greater healing from community violence exposure due to immediate engagement, stronger community voice and ownership over gun violence solutions, less duplication and redundancy due to coordinated efforts, and stronger partnerships and collaboration through relationship building.