Learn more about the practices that have helped Memphis and Shelby County promote collaborative violence prevention efforts.
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Collaborating across initiatives in order to minimize duplication of effort and maximize results
Operation: Safe Community laid a foundation that both the Memphis Youth Violence Prevention Plan and the Defending Childhood Initiative (DCI) have been able to grow from. They have been able to utilize the relationships and trust that had been built through the work of Operation: Safe Community and align aspects of implementation where feasible. For example, the initiatives were able to support:
Involving the highest levels of government and law enforcement
Through their coordinated leadership, all three initiatives have been able to involve high levels of government and law enforcement. This includes the mayors of Shelby County and the City of Memphis, U.S. attorneys, the director of the Memphis Police Department, the superintendent of Shelby County Schools, and more. The bipartisan leadership support has lent credibility to the work and has been instrumental in attracting additional partners.
Developing a message that connects violence prevention and economic growth
By shaping the message of violence prevention in economic terms, Memphis and Shelby County were able to engage and recruit business and economic development leaders that might not previously have seen how they were involved in violence prevention and crime reduction.
Creating a unifying mission for collaborations and coalitions that were already in place
Prior to the beginning of Operation: Safe Community and the work of the Crime Commission, there were already a number of collaborations and coalitions that were taking place in Memphis. By bringing together these groups under a common mission, the Crime Commission was able to utilize the strengths of these collaborative relationships that had already been established.
Creating transparency and eliciting feedback from the community
The collaborations have recognized the importance of making their work transparent and accessible to the community and other agencies in order to attract new partners and ensure that the community feels ownership for the work that is being done. All three have worked carefully to develop strategic plans that provide clear goals and metrics, are supported by data, include evidence-based practices, include accountability measures, and were supported by community feedback.
The Memphis Youth Violence Prevention Plan provides a good example of a diverse range of methods used to get representative community feedback before and during plan development. These include the following:
All three plans are data-driven. They have or plan to use data to support the planning process and to hold implementation efforts accountable.
The partnership with the University of Memphis’s Center for Community Criminology and Research (C3R) has provided data analysis and research support across the initiatives. Data has been used to illustrate the need for violence prevention efforts, understand risk factors and areas of exposure, identify community sites to target work, monitor implementation, show accountability, and illustrate accomplishments to partners and community members. For example:
DCI used data and its partnership with the University of Memphis’s Center for Community Building and Neighborhood Action (CBANA) to conduct a needs assessment in order to
Coordinating with other initiatives to support data-sharing across agencies
Data-sharing across agencies as a method for evaluation is a key long-term goal of DCI. As DCI collects information about data-sharing from the Department of Justice and other sources, it is also working with a grant on teen parenting that has pledged to pay for the first platform of data sharing. The goal is to have a data-sharing system that extends beyond preventing teen pregnancy to also include limiting exposure to violence.
Operation: Safe Community has had experience with sharing data through a gang prevention pilot program based on the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) comprehensive gang model it has implemented for the past two years. Within that model, a Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) based on the template from OJJDP has been used for the sharing of data between law enforcement, schools, youth services, and the courts.
As the data system is rolled out, the intent is to use a similar MOA template for the DCI work. The hope is that the successful history and example of the MOA being used for sharing data between agencies will ensure that partners are more comfortable with the idea of data sharing.
Conducting both national and local evaluations
Both DCI and the Memphis Youth Violence Prevention Plan are conducting local process evaluations to assess their work, as well as national evaluations through the Department of Justice. The DCI plan will be evaluated at the national level through the Center for Court Innovations. DCI also wrote into its grant a local evaluation in order to ensure it is prepared for the national evaluation. The Memphis Youth Violence Prevention Plan has a similar multi-leveled structure for evaluation. At the national level, it is being evaluated through Jay University, which is providing ongoing evaluation and feedback to all National Youth Violence Prevention Forum member cities. At the local level, the Crime Commission is working through a university research partnership each year to identify the strategies, including youth violence prevention, that need the most support.
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Note: Accomplishments reflect outcomes of Operation Safe Community. Both the Defending Childhood Initiative and Memphis Youth Violence Prevention Plan are in early stages of implementation.
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