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ABSTRACT
Much attention in the field of community-based youth violence prevention has focused on the importance of evidence-based programs and practices – there are multiple lists of effective and promising programs (e.g. Blueprints, CrimeSolutions.gov), and reviews of best practices in the US and internationally are readily available (e.g. World Health Organization, 2010). Less attention has been directed toward community motivation and ‘readiness’ for action, although it is beginning to be recognized as an important component of implementation, scale-up and sustainability. Readiness refers to a community’s willingness to address a problem, access to resources and knowledge about empirically supported best practices. This paper presents findings from a qualitative study assessing community readiness for youth violence prevention in high-violence, low resource communities in three cities in two countries (El Alto and Santa Cruz, Bolivia and Wilmington, DE, USA). Based on the community readiness literature we developed a semi-structured interview to characterize and provide feedback to communities on strengths and challenges, and conducted 85 interviews with key leaders across the three communities. We also were interested in exploring whether communities with high youth violence problems, but different historical, cultural and economic characteristics shared common challenges that could provide broader guidance for community-based prevention and policies in high violence settings. Across the three settings, high violence communities were keenly aware of the problem and motivated to address it, but lacked resources and knowledge of evidence-based practices.
Acknowledgment
This work was supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation under Grant #72396.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. 0 = data source does not exist, does not meet any minimal standards, or is not accessible beyond the specific agency; 10 = data source exists, is accessible and of use to the community.