Community Violence Intervention at the Roots (CVI–R): Building Evidence for Grassroots Community Violence Prevention

By Katheryne Pugliese, Paul Odér, Talib Hudson, and Jeffrey A. Butts

The crime and justice field recently started to label a wide array of violence prevention strategies as Community Violence Interventions (or CVI). Many of these strategies depend on law enforcement and social services, but the most innovative approaches are community-centered and community-sourced. They are grassroots efforts that rely on the resources of neighborhoods and residents themselves, operating separately from law enforcement and traditional human services. These strategies could be called Community Violence Interventions at the Roots (or CVI-R). The most established CVI-R programs are Cure Violence and Advance Peace. They offer highly localized and potentially cost-effective approaches to public safety, but do they work? Evaluation evidence is recent and not yet consistent, but the grassroots approach to community violence prevention is highly promising. To build sustainable CVI-R models, communities and researchers must collaborate in designing rigorous evaluations to produce reliable and actionable evidence.

New York: John Jay College of Criminal Justice, 2022. 19p.