Summer 2000 Issue
Reason To Hope
New partnership seeks to stop youth violence before it starts
The headlines from the past couple of years have been all too chilling: School shootings in Colorado, Kentucky, Michigan, Georgia and elsewhere. The statistics are just as shocking. On average, 17 young people (ages 17 to 24) were killed every day in 1997. In that same year, 85 percent of homicide victims ages 15 to 19 were killed with a firearm.The public health threat of youth violence has spawned prevention programs directed at teenagers and young adults. Now, a CDC Foundation partnership is seeking to reach children before they reach adolescence, or even pre-adolescence.
The Foundation’s partnership stems from a $174,526 grant from the Metropolitan Life Foundation to foster CDC involvement in the American Psychological Association’s (APA’s) Reason to Hope project. The project – a joint initiative between the APA, the National Association for the Education of Young Children and The Advertising Council – will teach violence prevention to adults who care for children ages 2 to 8.
Violence among children is rare, notwithstanding the case of a 6-year-old first grader in Michigan who shot to death a classmate last February. But the organizers of Reason to Hope would like to keep such violent acts from increasing, as well as reduce the incidence of violence later in childhood and adolescence. They are focusing on the 2 to 8 age group because those are the years in which children most readily absorb violence or anti-violence.
“There are many violence prevention programs across the nation, and most of them begin at middle school or later,” says Jacqueline Gentry, Director of APA’s Public Interest Initiatives. “Reason to Hope highlights the bedrock importance of early years, striving to make early childhood violence prevention a central part of promoting nonviolence among youth.”
When the opportunity to partner with the Met Life Foundation became a possibility, the CDC Foundation approached Rodney Hammond at CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (NCIPC). Good things happen when preparation meets opportunity, says Hammond, who directs the center’s violence prevention division.
“We felt the project would build on CDC’s goal of diffusing violence prevention messages and programs nationally,” says Hammond, who was already familiar with APA’s Reason to Hope project. “When the CDC Foundation contacted us to see if we had any recommendations for the Met Life Foundation grant, the Reason to Hope project came immediately to mind.”
Reason to Hope combines local training for teachers and child care workers with a national media campaign developed by a New York advertising agency through The Advertising Council. The Met Life Foundation grant to the CDC Foundation provided a significant boost. Not only will it introduce CDC’s public health expertise to the project, it also covers some of the cost of public service announcements, advertising, a toll-free number and distribution of response materials.
The project’s training component will prepare professionals and community members to teach practical skills in violence prevention to parents, teachers and others who care for young children. The trainees will then be able to share new training initiatives with other communities.
The combination of building awareness and training adults appealed to the Metropolitan Life Foundation. “We view violence as a public health issue,” says Sibyl Jacobson, the Foundation’s president and CEO. “The Reason to Hope project had the right components that build upon our years of support for youth violence prevention initiatives. By focusing on people who have influence on young children, we can give them the tools to prevent violence early in life.”