City of Greensboro Office of Community Safety GSO Peace on Purpose Community Violence Intervention and Prevention Program

The City of Greensboro Office of Community Safety proposes to address community violence through a new violence interruption/intervention initiative entitled GSO Peace on Purpose. This program will take a multidisciplinary approach involving public, private, and community partners that will be brought together to form a coalition to create a violence prevention-intervention- interruption-deterrence that reduces violence, strengthens community resilience, and builds social capital across the City of Greensboro, North Carolina. The intent of this program will be to apply best practices in community violence interruption alongside strategies that strengthen the community violence intervention ecosystem. Project activities will include the creation of a comprehensive violence reduction strategic plan; regular review of data; street outreach; community awareness; referrals from partners including law enforcement, community providers, and schools to identify conflicts requiring immediate intervention; and robust program evaluations to ensure success and sustainability. A risk of violence assessment tool will be created based on known associated factors with risk of violence (i.e., prior involvement in violence) and used to target individuals with high propensity for community violence. The target population will be individuals aged 14 - 34, but persons younger and older who pose high risk of violence also will be eligible for interruption, intervention, and outreach services. Along with this person-risk approach, the project also will also employ a place-based approach by targeting specific locations that are associated with recurring acts of community violence. Because violence and certain locations offer more opportunity for violent activities, this initiative will use its partner organization network to identify and track individuals and places where community violence is most likely to occur and when possible, implement preemptive interventions to mediate conflicts from becoming violent. Expected outcomes of this include: (1) a reduction in the violence in Greensboro; (2) an increase in conflict mediation with and between individuals at high risk of gun violence; (3) utilization of risk narratives to help create a shared responsibility to coordinate violence intervention efforts; (4) connections of high-risk individuals to needed services; (5) provision of training and community dissemination of trauma-informed, healing-centered approaches to violence intervention; (6) increased coordination across the community to build a cohesive violence intervention ecosystem of care.