Proceedings of The 7th International Academic Conference on Humanities and Social Sciences
Year: 2022
DOI:
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A pathway of developing university-community-school collaborative youth violence prevention program
Caleb Kim, Ph.D., MSW, MDiv
ABSTRACT:
University-community-school collaboration has grown in popularity due to shared benefits of each partnering institute. However, developing a partnership among university, community and school is complex and challenging because it brings together diverse staff, different organizational structures, and unique climates that may lead to conflicts and tensions among collaborators. Because of this potential inter-group tensions, each collaborator often feels overwhelmed, hesitated, and frustrated in developing a partnership. Thus, using the US federally funded BRAVE youth violence prevention program as a case study, this study explores a systemic pathway that follows through a four-phase of the collaboration process (i.e., initiation, clarification, implementation and completion phase) and demonstrates its shared benefits of collaboration. In addition, this presentation explores significant facilitators and barriers that negatively or positively impact on building a successful violence prevention program for minority youth living in disadvantaged urban communities in Chicago. Identified facilitators for collaboration are agreed mutual benefits, trust relationship, mutual respect, shared power in decision-making, flexibility, and cultural competence while barriers are higher staff turnover, scarce agency space for program, and lack of adequate funding. While presenting the pathway of collaborative youth violence prevention program, this study also offers the results of the university-community-school collaborative violence prevention program that has improved high-risk youth’s peer relations, decreased gang activities, achieved academic success, engaged with community activities and prevented youth violence.
keywords: disadvantaged communities, pathway, university-community-school collaboration, violence prevention, youth.