Columbia University Center for Youth Violence Prevention
Columbia University
Bruce Link, PhD - Principal Investigator
Mailman School of Public Health
722 W. 168th St. Suite 1609
New York, NY 10032
Bgl1@columbia.edu
Center website
The Columbia Center for Youth Violence Prevention (CCYVP) is a multidisciplinary collaboration of researchers and community mobilization experts and organizations dedicated to understanding and addressing the causes and consequences of youth violence in urban areas, including the neighborhoods of Washington Heights/Inwood, where the Center is located. Through its collaborative efforts, the Center is committed to developing, implementing and evaluating evidence-based interventions that are responsive to the evolving needs and concerns of culturally-diverse urban communities.
CCYVP was established as an Academic Center of Excellence by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2000. CCYVP's goals are to bring together researchers, practitioners, community representatives and policy makers; foster an integrated approach to youth violence in the Washington Heights/Inwood (WH/I) sections of New York City; monitor changes in youth violence in New York City in general and in WH/I in particular; understand and attend to the causes and consequences of this violence; develop, identify, support, evaluate and disseminate promising interventions; develop and implement an
integrated, multilevel, community mobilization plan to reduce youth violence in the WH/I area; train a new generation of violence researchers and practitioners; and to disseminate findings locally, regionally, nationally and internationally.
CCYVP addresses one of the nation's leading public health problems—youth violence. The approach to this problem is multilevel, multidisciplinary and action-oriented:
- Multilevel: Research shows that influences on youth violence operate on multiple levels (individual, family, peer group, school, neighborhood, and nation state) producing dramatic variations in the prevalence of youth violence across person, context and time. Therefore, effective public health responses need to integrate interventions that address these multiple levels of influence.
- Multidisciplinary: The Center draws from the theories and methods of multiple disciplines, including anthropology, epidemiology, law, psychology and sociology, because no single perspective captures the complexity of youth violence.
- Action-oriented: CCYVP works with Community Outreach and Development Efforts Save (CODES), a coalition of organizations and individuals committed to addressing the problems of youth violence in Washington Heights/Inwood. Coalition members include schools, police, city council, service organizations, youth service agencies, parks and recreation department, residents and others who have joined together to coordinate responses to "incidents" and "flare ups" of youth violence in the community and to take proactive steps to ameliorate conditions that give rise to violence. CCYVP will develop and implement a community mobilization plan in concert with CODES.
The goal of the Columbia Center is to develop a theoretically- and empirically-based
understanding of youth violence as to help develop an integrated multi-level intervention response.
Page last modified: May 16, 2007