Susan Morrel-Samuels

Organizational Empowerment in Community Mobilization to Address Youth Violence

Community mobilization efforts to address youth violence are often disconnected, uncoordinated, and lacking adequate resources. An organizational empowerment theory for community partnerships provides a useful framework for organizing and evaluating a coalitions community mobilization efforts and benefits for individual organizations, partnerships, and communities. Based on a qualitative analysis of steering committee interviews and other primary data, the results of a case study suggest that the intraorganizational infrastructure; interorganizational membership practices and networking; and extraorganizational research, training, and organizing activities facilitate the community mobilization efforts of the Youth Violence Prevention Center in Flint, Michigan. The organizational empowerment framework, and its focus on organizational structures and processes, illustrates the importance of recognizing and incorporating the organizational systems and structures that provide the foundation on which a community mobilization effort may build. This framework also highlights how organizational structures and processes are central components of multilevel strategies for organizing and mobilizing community efforts to address youth violence.

Youth Empowerment Solutions for Peaceful Communities: Combining Theory and Practice in a Community-Level Violence Prevention Curriculum

This article describes the development and evaluation of an after-school curriculum designed to prepare adolescents to prevent violence through community change. This curriculum, part of the Youth Empowerment Solutions for Peaceful Communities (YES) program, is guided by empowerment and ecological theories within a positive youth development context. YES is designed to enhance the capacity of adolescents and adults to work together to plan and implement community change projects. The youth curriculum is organized around six themed units: (a) Youth as Leaders, (b) Learning about Our Community, (c) Improving Our Community, (d) Building Intergenerational Partnerships, (e) Planning for Change, and (f) Action and Reflection. The curriculum was developed through an iterative process. Initially, program staff members documented their activities with youth. These outlines were formalized as curriculum sessions. Each session was reviewed by the program and research staff and revised based on underlying theory and practical application. The curriculum process evaluation includes staff and youth feedback. This theoretically based, field-tested curriculum is designed to be easily adapted and implemented in a diverse range of communities.

Community-Based Organizational Capacity Building as a Strategy to Reduce Racial Health Disparities

One of the biggest challenges facing racial health disparities research is identifying how and where to implement effective, sustainable interventions. Community-based organizations (CBOs) and community-academic partnerships are frequently utilized as vehicles to conduct community health promotion interventions without attending to the viability and sustainability of CBOs or capacity inequities among partners. Utilizing organizational empowerment theory, this paper describes an intervention designed to increase the capacity of CBOs and community-academic partnerships to implement strategies to improve community health. The Capacity Building project illustrates how capacity building interventions can help to identify community health needs, promote community empowerment, and reduce health disparities.

From Broken Windows to Busy Streets A Community Empowerment Perspective

In the present article, we introduce a community empowerment perspective to understanding neighborhoods. A preponderance of literature exists on neighborhood risk factors for crime. Yet less is known about positive factors that make neighborhoods safe and desirable. We propose community empowerment as a conceptual foundation for understanding neighborhood factors that promote social processes, and ultimately, lead to an improvement in structural factors. We suggest that neighborhoods are empowered because they include processes and structures for positive social interactions to emerge and develop. We present busy streets as a mechanism that creates a positive social context, in which social cohesion and social capital thrive. Thus, empowered communities are characterized by climates that promote busy streets. Our article underscores the need to examine both the broader, structural context and social processes operating within this context. Such an integrative perspective is necessary to fully understand how to empower neighborhoods, particularly in the face of structural challenges.

Guns, Gangs, and Gossip An Analysis of Student Essays on Youth Violence

Youth violence is an important public health problem, but few researchers have studied violence from youth’s perspectives. Middle school students’ essays about the causes of youth violence were analyzed using qualitative and quantitative methods. The causes of violence identified by students were categorized into individual, peer, family, and societal factors. Seven to 11 subcategories were identified within each factor. Variations in the frequency of quotes among factors, the independent effects of factor and sex, and their interaction were examined. Peer factors were identified most often and family factors least often as causes of violence. Females were more likely than males to report peer factors as a cause. The most frequently mentioned subcategories within each factor were lack of anger management, need for acceptance, harassment/lack of respect, violence in the media, and parenting practices. The discussion examines youth’s theories about the causation of violence and their implications for interventions.

Using Process Evaluation to Strengthen Intergenerational Partnerships in the Youth Empowerment Solutions Program

This study illustrates the utility of process evaluation methods for improving a new violence prevention program, Youth Empowerment Solutions for Peaceful Communities (YES). The YES program empowered young adolescents to plan and complete community improvement projects with neighborhood adult advocates. The process evaluation methods included questionnaires and focus groups with students and interviews with neighborhood advocates. Process evaluation results guided program improvements for the second year. The process evaluation results after the second program year suggested that the program improvements were associated with higher student ratings of program staff and neighborhood advocates. The students and neighborhood advocates reported increased positive experiences after the second program year, but continued to note the challenges of working inter-generationally on community improvement projects.

Using a community-based health survey as a tool for informing local health policy.

BACKGROUND The Speak to Your Health! community survey is a biennial community-based survey designed and implemented by the Prevention Research Center of Michigan whose central mission is to strengthen the capacity of the community to improve health. METHOD The survey was developed collaboratively by the university and community partners that comprise the Prevention Research Center of Michigan and focuses on health and social issues at the heart of the community of Genesee County, Michigan. FINDINGS The results of this survey have been used to shape policy changes and strategic planning at the county health department and in local health intervention programs. CONCLUSIONS This project has demonstrated that useful quantitative data for addressing local public health policy and planning can be collected using the principles of community-based research.

Community Engagement in Youth Violence Prevention: Crafting Methods to Context

The purpose of the Youth Violence Prevention Centers (YVPC) Program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is to reduce youth violence in defined high-risk communities through the implementation and evaluation of comprehensive, evidence based prevention strategies. Within this common framework, each YVPC varies in its structure and methods, however all engage communities in multiple ways. We explore aspects of community engagement employed by three centers that operate in very different contexts: a rural county in North Carolina; a suburban area of Denver, Colorado; and an urban setting in Flint, Michigan. While previous research has addressed theories supporting community involvement in youth violence prevention, there has been less attention to the implementation challenges of achieving and sustaining participation. In three case examples, we describe the foci and methods for community engagement in diverse YVPC sites and detail the barriers and facilitating factors that have influenced implementation. Just as intervention programs may need to be adapted in order to meet the needs of specific populations, methods of community engagement must be tailored to the context in which they occur. We discuss case examples of community engagement in areas with varying geographies, histories, and racial and ethnic compositions. Each setting presents distinct challenges and opportunities for conducting collaborative violence prevention initiatives and for adapting engagement methods to diverse communities. Although approaches may vary depending upon local contexts, there are certain principles that appear to be common across cultures and geography: trust, transparency, communication, commitment. We also discuss the importance of flexibility in community engagement efforts.

Three Cs of Translating Evidence-Based Programs for Youth and Families to Practice Settings.

Despite the growing number of evidence-based programs (EBPs) for youth and families, few are well-integrated in service systems or widely adopted by communities. One set of challenges to widespread adoption of EBPs relates to the transfer of programs from research and development to practice settings. This is often because program developers have limited guidance on how to prepare their programs for broad dissemination in practice settings. We describe Three Cs of Translation, which are key areas that are essential for developers to translate their EBPs from research to practice settings: (1) Communicate the underlying theory in terms easily understandable to end users, (2) Clarify fidelity and flexibility, and (3) Codify implementation lessons and examples. Program developers are in the best position to describe their interventions, to define intervention core components, to clarify fidelity and flexibility, and to codify implementation lessons from intervention studies. We note several advantages for developers to apply the Three Cs prior to intervention dissemination and provide specific recommendations for translation.

Youth Empowerment Solutions: Evaluation of an After-School Program to Engage Middle School Students in Community Change:

We report on an effectiveness evaluation of the Youth Empowerment Solutions (YES) program. YES applies empowerment theory to an after-school program for middle school students. YES is an active learning curriculum designed to help youth gain confidence in themselves, think critically about their community, and work with adults to create positive community change. We employed a modified randomized control group design to test the hypothesis that the curriculum would enhance youth empowerment, increase positive developmental outcomes, and decrease problem behaviors. Our sample included 367 youth from 13 urban and suburban middle schools. Controlling for demographic characteristics and pretest outcome measures, we found that youth who received more components of the curriculum reported more psychological empowerment and prosocial outcomes and less antisocial outcomes than youth who received fewer of the intervention components. The results support both empowerment theory and program effectiveness.