Update: Youth Violence Initiative

Since its launch in July 2007, New Haven’s privately-funded Street Outreach Worker Project is showing strong success in reducing youth violence in vulnerable neighborhoods. Key to its work is recognizing that barriers to economic opportunity place communities at risk for bloodshed.

So far, the project has served 243 youths, more than half from the Hill and Fair Haven neighborhoods. Eighty-five percent of the teens are African American, 69 percent of them are male, 60 percent have criminal records for drug offenses, and 42 percent have been involved in a violent crime.

The statistics, however, don’t tell the true story of the youth involved in the Street Outreach Worker Project, according to Kica Matos, the City of New Haven’s community services administrator.

"The project recently brought together two groups of kids who were feuding from different neighborhoods to sit down and talk with each other," Matos says. "It’s clear these kids come from a culture where violence is often used to resolve disputes. However, at the end of the day, it’s clear that they are just kids — smart, talented, but troubled kids."

The project represents a collaboration between the City of New Haven, the New Haven Family Alliance (NHFA), and the New Haven Police Department. In the eight months since its inception, it has succeeded in reducing violence among youth throughout the city including a significant drop in assaults with a dangerous weapon in almost all neighborhoods.

The project organized more than 74 mediations involving 158 youths. Many mediation sessions resulted in no-gun-violence agreements. Street outreach workers also worked with police to be on the scene following an act of youth violence, to help defuse retaliation and identify kids in need of services.

The New Haven Family Alliance strives to connect youth at risk of violence to educational and economic opportunities in order to discourage community conflict.

Much of what they do involves building relationships. When an outreach worker begins working with a youth, a complete assessment identifies individual and community needs, says Barbara Tinney, NHFA executive director. In addition to getting connected with educational opportunities such as GED programs, participants enroll in a four-day-a-week, six-week course on life skills, conflict resolution, and employability. The goal: to support the youth in securing a livable-wage job.

"The program is very intense, but these young folks, like all kids, have a real hunger to be engaged, stimulated, and to learn," Tinney says. Since the project started, 40-plus youth have been connected to local private-sector jobs.