Artwork stating 'Education Destroys Barriers', 'We Demand Treatment', and 'I Need A Chance'

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  • Wichita couple overcomes drug addiction, creates organization for teens

    Rise Up for Youth is a program built into some Wichita schools that works to keep teenagers out of gangs and helps them focus on positive changes in their community. There are two programs — one for males called the Brotherhood and one for females called Sisterhood – which encourage teens to keep busy and find activities that give them a natural high. Participants visit prisons, talk with police and people coming out of incarceration, and make college visits. Since the program started, 100% of student participants have graduated from high school and many have gone on to college and have successful careers.

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  • Inside One Baltimore Group's Effort to Stop Youth Violence Before It Starts

    Baltimore's Roca program uses cognitive behavioral therapy, and patience and persistence, to work at changing the thinking of young people at high risk of committing or suffering gun violence. Counselors help their clients examine the trauma in their lives, learn to change their reactions to stress and conflict, and to choose legitimate jobs over the street economy. Unlike violence interruption programs that seek to mediate crises just as they threaten to turn deadly, Roca does its work further upstream, seeking to shape interactions before they turn critical.

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  • San Francisco's new homeless street teams make progress, garner praise

    San Francisco's Street Crisis Response Team is a pilot project meant to divert 911 calls for mental health emergencies from police to new teams of mobile counselors. Though it started with only one team and later expanded to four, the project in less than six months took 20% of the eligible calls. More than half the clients were helped on the streets, while most others were hospitalized or connected with shelters. The city is proposing a major expansion of this and related teams aimed at reducing the reliance on police in non-violent situations.

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  • How a program became a model for life after prison

    Colorado's Transforming Safety initiative empowers communities to decide how to use grant money to address high rates of recidivism. One community-chosen grantee is Colorado Springs Works, founded by a man who made a habit of asking those he was incarcerated with why they had been sent back to prison on parole violations. Lack of good jobs was a key reason, and so the program he created helps recently incarcerated people get job training and jobs on the outside.

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  • A Mexico Housing Community With No Police

    On the outskirts of Mexico City, the self-governed Acapatzingo Housing Community prevents crime and resolves disputes without any involvement by the police. The community, founded at an abandoned mine to provide housing to people living in poverty, sits adjacent to a neighborhood that suffers thousands of violent crimes per year. But the housing community and its citizen-guard patrols, mediators, and network of walls and fences manage to limit the number of crimes and conflicts to about 60 per year. The police are viewed as unresponsive and corrupt, while the community's security is rooted in trust.

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  • Startup Helps Those Affected By Gangs And Gun Violence Find A Way Out

    The boom in green-energy spending and government grants fuels the work of Leaders Before Legends, a Portland startup that lines up well-paying jobs installing solar panels and the like. The jobs go to people formerly incarcerated on charges related to gun violence. Leaders was founded by a man whose own gun-charge incarceration exposed him to the way that business people think. He turned that exposure into a mission to help others learn how to make money legally and safely. In the past year, the program has found work for 10 people. It is working to expand its city funding to scale up.

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  • How well is Cure Violence working in St. Louis?

    While homicides in St. Louis in the first part of 2021 increased over already-high numbers in recent years, three neighborhoods served by a new Cure Violence program showed significant decreases in homicides, assaults, and robberies. Cure Violence, a national program, puts "violence interrupters" on the streets to intervene before arguments turn deadly and to provide people with services they need. In one neighborhood, Dutchtown, interrupters say they prevented 87 incidents in less than seven months. The city now is trying to find the money to expand the program to more areas of the city.

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  • Early Cure Violence statistics promising, city health official says

    In the parts of two neighborhoods where the violence-intervention program Cure Violence has been active since June 2020, and a third where it has been operating since January, more than 300 potentially violent incidents were averted through the work of Cure Violence's "violence interrupters." The interrupters mediate disputes and then help people get the social services they might need to stabilize their lives. Homicides, assaults, and robberies are down in those neighborhoods while up citywide so far in 2021. The city agreed to spend $7 million to launch the program, which some hope to expand.

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  • Reimagining a Better World After George Floyd's Death

    Two ways that communities affected by police violence and racial injustice responded to the uprising after George Floyd's murder were block-by-block organizing and participatory budgeting. The first, used in Minneapolis, provided public safety and mutual aid when neighbors formed networks to guard buildings, put out fires, mediate disputes, and deliver aid to people living through a period of unrest. In participatory budgeting, 30 cities turned over control of $400 million in public spending to communities, which set policy based on communal decisions and directed financial priorities.

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  • Community-led alternative to criminal justice resolves conflict, fosters community and protects youth

    Restorative justice healing circles run by Cookman Beloved Community Baptist Church in West Philadelphia have helped resolve hundreds of disputes among youth over the past 15 years using dialogue instead of courts. Bringing together people who were harmed, those who harmed them, and members of the community leads to negotiated agreements that provide justice and reconciliation without leaving young people with a criminal record. Restorative-justice approaches to school discipline in Philadelphia have dropped the numbers of arrests from 1,600 to 384 per year.

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