Violence Prevention: The Importance of Grassroots Leaders

TCWF views the injury and death caused by violence as a serious public health issue. In 1992, the Foundation launched its Violence Prevention Initiative (VPI), a 10-year, $70 million grantmaking program focused on preventing violence against young people.

The Foundation’s VPI Leadership Development Program was informed by violence prevention position papers published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the plan for violence prevention developed by the California Department of Health Services. These documents called for the nurturing of grassroots leaders who could address the root causes and consequences of violence in their local communities.

Despite the high rates of violence against youth in the 1990s, the individuals working to prevent it were on a lonely frontier. At that time, violence prevention barely existed as a concept. For example, in the early 1990s, Contra Costa was the only California county that had a violence prevention program. Most violence prevention efforts in California focused primarily on arrest and incarceration as a method of deterrence, which resulted in one of the highest youth incarceration rates in the nation — twice the national average.

There is no inherent conflict between incarceration and prevention. They both have a place along a continuum of programs that address social ills. In the 1990s, however, the state of California was narrowly focused on incarceration at the expense of prevention. During this time, the state spent approximately $8 million annually on prevention — and billions on state-of-the-art prisons to house offenders.

Along with the lack of violence prevention resources provided by the state, the epidemic of violence in California was exacerbated by newspaper coverage that painted a portrait of overwhelming and uncontrollable criminality. Editorial pages described communities affected by violence as bullet-ridden war zones.

According to the Center for Media and Public Affairs, crime coverage over the past decade was the number one topic in newspapers and on the nightly news. From 1990 to 1998, homicide rates dropped by half nationwide, but homicide stories on the three major networks rose almost fourfold.

In news coverage, community members trying to make a difference were either portrayed as helpless victims or simply ignored. And the only proposed cure for this epidemic was to add more police officers and more prisons.

Missing from this picture were the stories of thousands of unsung heroes in California who were putting their lives on the line every day to prevent violence and promote peace in their communities.

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