Abstract:
As part of the U.S. Attorney General’s Defending Childhood Demonstration Program, eight sites around the country were funded by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention and the Office of Violence Against Women to use a collaborative process to develop and implement programming to address children’s exposure to violence in their communities. Shelby County, Tennessee was chosen as one of these sites, and, since 2010, has received over $3 million in federal funding for this initiative. Led by the Shelby County Office of Early Childhood and Youth, the Shelby County Defending Childhood Initiative is known as the Network for Overcoming Violence and Abuse (“NOVA”). The program serves children ages 0-17 who have directly or indirectly been exposed to violence and initially targeted three apartment complexes in the Frayser and Hickory Hill neighborhoods in Memphis. These locations were chosen because of their high concentrations of violent crime and poverty. A major component of the initiative was to place staff in the three target apartment complexes, where staff conducted outreach to children and families in need, and, through case management and advocacy, referred and connected families to necessary services for therapeutic treatment and to organizations that could help them meet other basic needs (e.g., rental assistance). NOVA also created a service delivery model based on a “No Wrong Door” approach where at-risk children or children who have been exposed to violence and their parents in the targeted neighborhoods could receive treatment services as well as support for taking care of their basic needs no matter where their needs are identified. Other components of NOVA’s programming included holding two community awareness campaigns. One targeted the professional community—law enforcement, treatment providers, and others who work with children and youth—to let them know about the services available through NOVA. A separate community awareness campaign was created for community members, particularly residents in the targeted apartment complexes and consisted of fairs and community cafes where apartment residents would learn about different topics, such as child abuse prevention and nurturing parenting. In addition, NOVA partnered with the University of Memphis’ Department of Social Work to train professionals who work with children on children’s exposure to violence. Finally, NOVA contracted with external consultants to create a shared data management system to be used as a trauma surveillance, referral and case management tool by NOVA agencies and others after the Defending Childhood grant ends. NOVA created many opportunities for both children and adults of Shelby County who have been affected by violence, and the collaboration among NOVA’s many partner agencies has been one of the initiative’s notable successes. However, the strategy of place-based targeted outreach and case management, although successful in helping families in need, may have shifted the focus of the initiative away from addressing children’s exposure to violence to a focus on the associated problems of concentrated poverty and housing instability found in the targeted apartment complexes. A place-based approach may be more appropriate for initiatives that address poverty than for ones that have a specific focus on children’s exposure to violence. Despite this caution arising from the research on the NOVA program, evidence is insufficient to conclude definitively that a place-based model for addressing exposure to violence could not be strengthened. (CVRL Note: see also the Attorney General’s full report on this program, Protect, Heal, Thrive: Lessons Learned from the Defending Childhood Demonstration Program NCJ 248882, and related site process evaluation reports, NCJ 248932, NCJ 248929, NCJ 248930, NCJ 248931, and NCJ 248933.) (NCJRS Abstract)