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Nashville Community Coalition for Youth Safety
A spike in Nashville 's murder rate in 2005 caused local citizens to be concerned, especially because many of the perpetrators and victims were youth.
In 2006, the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention funded Meharry Medical College in Nashville, TN to conduct research on youth violence. Along with the funding came specific instructions: involve the whole community in solving this problem.
And so the Nashville Community Coalition for Youth Safety (NCCYS) was formed. Composed of 172 members from 86 community organizations, NCCYS works with the Nashville Urban Partnership Academic Center of Excellence on Youth Violence Prevention (NUPACE)—a program at Meharry Medical College—to make decisions about how to address youth violence through research, evaluation, planning, communication and dissemination. This Coalition includes Vanderbilt University, the United Way of Metropolitan Nashville, the YMCA and many other organizations.
In April 2007, Coalition members attended the 3rd Helping America's Youth Regional Conference held at Tennessee State University where they were introduced to the Community Guide to Helping America's Youth. Since then, the partnership has used the Guide's overview of risk and protective factors to educate their Coalition members. They've also used MapIt, an online mapping tool, to look up useful census data on the condition of youth in Nashville and to see which community organizations are receiving federal funds.
With a strategic plan in place, the Nashville community partnership plans to conduct prevention research, identify promising interventions, implement a surveillance system, monitor changes in rates of violence and promote communication about violence in their community.
Tell us how your community partnership is using the Community Guide to Helping America's Youth by emailing us at the following address: comments@helpingamericasyouth.gov
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