Youth ALIVE!

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Caught in the Crossfire

Youth ALIVE! is a non-profit public health agency founded in 1991 dedicated to preventing youth violence and generating youth leadership in California communities experiencing high rates of violence. Youth ALIVE! advocates for strategies to reduce violence, and runs two programs in Oakland and Los Angeles:

CAUGHT IN THE CROSSFIRE, an intervention program that works with youth who are hospitalized due to violent injuries to reduce retaliation, re-injury, and arrest.

TEENS ON TARGET, a peer leadership and violence prevention program that trains young people from neighborhoods with high rates of violence to provide peer education to middle school students and to become advocates for violence prevention.

Get the Facts on youth gun violence

Gun violence is a leading killer of young people in this country, but it is an epidemic that is preventable. The young people of Youth ALIVE! are "urban messengers," bringing solutions to their peers, the media, policymakers and the community.

Communities We Serve

Youth ALIVE! works with young people in Oakland and Los Angeles who face multiple barriers to their safety and success. They battle with violence in their neighborhoods, easy access to guns, poverty, limited access to resources, high drop-out rates from school and more.

Oakland has one of the highest homicide rates in the nation. A student survey conducted by TEENS ON TARGET participants at a middle school in Oakland found that half of the 150 students responding had witnessed a stabbing or a shooting. Only 12% of 11th graders said that they felt "very safe at school," yet most of Oakland middle and high school students receive no violence prevention messages or skills training at all.

Teens on Target Peer Violence Prevention Program

Young people living in the neighborhoods we serve in Los Angeles face a host of challenges: 44% of children live below the poverty line, and 75% of adults have not attained the equivalent of a high school diploma. Just over 2,000 juveniles were arrested for weapons possession in Los Angeles County in 2005. Nearly half of all homicides in LA were young people under the age of 25.

The programs of Youth ALIVE! provide training to youth to build their leadership skills and support them in advocating for solutions to violence for themselves and their communities. Youth ALIVE! works to ensure that young people in California, no matter where they live, have the right to live to realize their full potential.