White House Supports Prevention
Youth ALIVE! created the nation’s very first hospital-based violence intervention program, Caught in the Crossfire (CiC), in 1993. Now a new White House Executive Order will for the first time allow Medicaid to reimburse community programs like Youth ALIVE!’s, acknowledging their healing services to victims and proven effectiveness at preventing further violence. This comes on the heels of President Biden’s jobs bill, unveiled the week prior, that would support community-based violence prevention programs.
Since its founding, CiC has supported thousands of young victims of gun violence and other assaults in Oakland, beginning at their hospital bedsides. CiC intervention specialists provide young victims with culturally-sensitive mentoring and trauma-informed case management. We have been advocating for such reimbursements for many years. In California, we advocated for Medi-Cal to reimburse programs like ours through AB 166 (Gabriel), a bill that was vetoed by the governor out of concern about how the federal government would interpret it. Now the federal government is officially onboard.
Here are some elements of the Biden-Harris infrastructure and jobs plan, as well as the new White House Executive Orders related to gun violence, that we support wholeheartedly.
- The American Jobs Plan proposes a $5 billion investment over eight years to support community violence intervention programs.
- The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is organizing a webinar and toolkit to educate states on how they can use Medicaid to reimburse certain community violence intervention programs, like Hospital-Based Violence Interventions.
- Five federal agencies are making changes to 26 different programs to direct vital support to community violence intervention programs as quickly as possible. These changes mean we can start increasing investments in community violence interventions as we wait on Congress to appropriate additional funds.