Clifford Beers Clinic, a counseling nonprofit in New Haven will equip community leaders with trauma-informed strategies needed to spot mental health crises and point families in the right direction for help and destigmatize getting such help.Īn award from the National Institutes of Health will provide an additional $3.9 million over five years for the implementation and evaluation of the TRUE HAVEN program, she explained. Importantly, these programs will not exclude people with a history of incarceration.” Organizations like Ice the Beef and ConnCAT aim to engage children in youth programs and mentorship. “The city of New Haven and the state have also offered direct access to housing assistance programs. “Yale University, the Yale New Haven Health System, local philanthropy, and other organizations have contributed over $1.25 million to date to be used for housing support and other forms of expertise for these neighborhoods and families,” Roy said. Places with higher levels of social cohesion and collective efficacy had lower rates of exposure to gun violence. It’s an ambitious plan that has the community support systems - and the money - in place to test some big hypotheses, Roy said. The researchers will employ a stepped-wedge design, applying community-developed interventions in two neighborhoods every year until all six targeted areas have interventions in place. Over the course of the study, TRUE HAVEN plans to enroll 1,400 families who have experienced the effects of incarceration first-hand, including those with members living in prisons or returning home. And we've got the right partners at the table that really can play a role in ensuring that we're successful.” Interventions We've not seen anyone do it quite like this. “We have a model that might be replicated all over the country, if not all over the world, in addressing gun violence and housing stability. “I think that's the exciting thing about this,” Spell said. The two leaders of the project hope it will be replicated in other communities if it is successful. So, everything seems to sync together so well for us.” “It's about addressing health disparities in our community. “When Brita brought the opportunity to the Urban League, I was excited that we would be offered the opportunity to participate in it because for us, it really is about housing stability,” Spell said. Spell said she was immediately intrigued by Roy’s proposed approach to reducing violence and strengthening communities in New Haven. “We want to create the conditions that allow people to have a fresh start and be able to secure and sustain stable housing and become productive members of society.” “We don’t want to see people get involved in gun violence again after release from prison,” Spell said. “So that provided some support for our theory that to break the cycle of chronic community gun violence, we could try to improve social cohesion within neighborhoods that have high rates of violence.”Īs part of the study, every year for the next three years, families in six primarily Black and Hispanic/Latino New Haven neighborhoods will gain access to a wide range of intervention programs - including tailored financial education and housing assistance, as well as access to trauma-informed counseling - in an effort to counteract what prior research has shown to be a precursor to gun violence: systemic racism. “Places with higher levels of social cohesion and collective efficacy had lower rates of exposure to gun violence,” Roy said. Previously, she and the community-academic research team had found that eviction rates and fractured bonds within neighborhoods were both associated with higher rates of gun violence. As faculty, she continued this partnership to understand how social cohesion and community well-being can influence rates of gun violence. Roy first became involved in this work a decade ago as a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program fellow (now the National Clinician Scholars Program), through the community-based participatory research curriculum of Yale’s Center for Research Engagement. The study is being led by Yale Brita Roy, MD, MPH, MHS, assistant professor of medicine (general medicine) and of epidemiology (chronic diseases) and core faculty of the SEICHE Center for Health and Justice, and Virginia Spell, chief executive officer of the Urban League of Southern Connecticut. The effort is part of a novel study, called TRUE HAVEN: Trusted Residents and Housing Assistance to Decrease Violence Exposure in New Haven. The Yale Schools of Medicine and Public Health and the Urban League of Southern Connecticut are teaming up with more than a dozen nonprofit organizations and local government agencies to see if an infusion of community programs and interventions in New Haven can mitigate systemic racism and reduce gun violence in the city.
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