You can help save lives! We are looking for passionate, relentless people motivated to prevent violence and develop youth leaders. We have openings for permanent positions as well as internships.
On January 10th, 2018, with a webinar and three action briefs, Youth ALIVE!, a nationally recognized violence prevention and youth leadership agency, released its Screening and Tool for the Awareness and Relief of Trauma (START), an intervention designed to help young people identify trauma symptoms and provide them with tools they can use to mitigate those symptoms. The tool was developed in tandem with young men of color, including gunshot survivors, who provided insight on how they experience trauma and its aftermath, the language they use to describe it, and how various interventions helped them heal.
Milwaukee was a plump and juicy bratwurst of a conference for the National Network of Hospital-based Violence Intervention Programs. Our annual national gathering really is becoming a must-attend event for the violence prevention community, and for the movement to address violence with healing, as a public health issue. The September meeting in Milwaukee was annual conference #7 and our best attended yet, with over 340 attendees from 78 cities. This year’s speakers brought both motivation and perspective and included former Surgeon General Dr. David Satcher, founder of the National Compadres Network Maestro Jerry Tello, and Dr. Thea James, Vice President of Mission at the Boston Medical Center.
It’s always a moment worth celebrating, when a young client gets off probation. It’s a fresh start. A new day. Pathways intervention specialists Jesus Martinez and Jelani Jenkins both celebrated just such a moment of freedom with clients, at court, in the past few weeks.
Trauma Screening, Awareness, Relief through "START"
Posted November 14, 2017
START(ing) to catch on!
START participants’ trauma symptoms decreased across the board
With inspiring results coming in every day (see chart which records decreases in frequency of symptoms), with more and more young people finding relief from their trauma using START (Screening and Tool for Awareness and Relief of Trauma), we’ve begun training other organizations to use our homegrown tool to identify trauma symptoms and give young sufferers temporary relief.
We’re happy to release our latest annual report, Prevention, Intervention & Healing, full of program results, pics of our clients, staff and friends and descriptions of the life-saving work we do, with your help.
In light of recent events in Charlottesville, to be silent is to be complicit. Speaking with one voice, we at Youth ALIVE! passionately denounce white supremacists and the national “leaders” who openly or tacitly encourage them. We also acknowledge shameful acts in our own back yard – from microaggressions to racist taunts and assaults, hate crimes and ICE raids – by people emboldened by seeing hate go unchecked.
TNT youth leaders and staff with OPD representatives at the forum.
This year Teens on Target is leading an effort to open up the lines of communication between the Oakland Police Department and Oakland youth, especially young people of color. Officers have attended Teens on Target meetings for intimate dialogues, and just before the end of the school year, TNT hosted a big public forum on Police/community relations at Castlemont attended by over 200 students, staff and faculty. The forum featured a panel of OPD officers and TNT youth leaders for a wide-ranging 90-minute discussion that at times was tense but in the end served as a promising kickoff of an ongoing TNT project to increase police transparency and to lift the veil that impedes mutual understanding between the community and the police. OPD representatives on the panel included longtime OPD veterans, Captains LeRonne Armstrong and Ersie Joyner, Sgt. Gordon Dorham and Officer Robert Smith. The panel took questions from the audience about what their training procedures are for dealing with youth of color, what to do if you feel you have been mistreated by the police, and what it’s like to be an African American police officer in Oakland. Next steps in the TNT’s work to address the climate of relations between the police and civilians of color in Oakland will be to help the Mayor’s public safety director as she puts together an OPD Youth Leadership Council to review policy recommendations, provide training to officers on how to deal with young people, advise on hiring, and offer their own policy recommendations.
