Catholic Health World

CHI grantees invite communities to partner in violence prevention

In Nebraska City, Neb., and Denville, N.J., hospital staff members are sitting down with police officers, teachers, social workers and others to discover what makes violence erupt in their communities and gather ideas about what can be done to prevent disagreements that might lead to injury or bloodshed.

"If we gather the snapshots from each of the key players, we can compile our data and tell the community, "This is what our big picture looks like on violence,'" said Deborah Norton, chief mission officer at St. Mary's Community Hospital in Nebraska City. The information can help shape programs and funnel resources where they can do the most good.

Said Sr. Susan C. Evelyn, RSM, vice president of mission integration for Saint Clare's Health System in Denville: "We don't assume we know" the causes of violence. "We want everyone and everything at the table."

St. Mary's serves a community of about 14,000 people in southeastern Nebraska. Saint Clare's has four hospitals in northern New Jersey, west of the New York suburbs.

St. Mary's and Saint Clare's are among 14 health systems, hospitals and a foundation within Catholic Health Initiatives that are sharing in more than $500,000 in first-round grants from the system's Mission and Ministry Fund through a program called "United Against Violence." CHI announced the program in January 2008 and awarded the grants in July 2009. It plans to provide millions of dollars in anti-violence grants over the next several years. The first-round grants range in size from an $88,940 award to Good Samaritan Behavioral Health Services in Dayton, Ohio, to $14,700 to the Franciscan Foundation in Tacoma, Wash., an affiliate of the Franciscan Health System.

CHI operates 75 hospitals in 19 states. Its grants will seed projects in urban, suburban and rural areas.

Positive force
Colleen Scanlon, CHI's senior vice president for advocacy, said preventing violence is a major priority of the system and its founding religious communities. Scanlon said hospitals treat the victims of violence every day and want to find ways to prevent the injuries and suffering violence engenders.

"Building healthy communities is much more than providing medical and health services within our four walls," said Scanlon, who also is CHA's board chair. "We see this as a natural extension of our work. It's crucial to try to minimize and eliminate violence every way we can."

Scanlon said CHI's "United Against Violence" local grant initiative encourages communities to look at themselves, decide what their biggest challenges are and develop programs that suit them best.

Violence prevention approaches and programs should grow out of community-based partnerships, she said. Toward this end, grant recipients are meeting with the stakeholders in their communities.

"We don't want to pre-define any of this work at the corporate level. Some communities may look at gang violence, or child abuse or violence in schools. The problems and solutions in each community may be very different. We want to work with all of the communities that CHI serves to eradicate episodes of violence. We know that it's a complex problem and that there is no short-term fix," Scanlon said.

Community input
At St. Mary's in Nebraska City, Norton and others working with her pursuant to the hospital's $40,000 grant, have prepared detailed questions and interviewed teachers, students, parents, ministers, behavioral health professionals and a prosecutor.

The next step for St. Mary's is to explore root causes of violence in the community. This will be accomplished through community focus group meetings in the middle of this month, Norton said.

The process will guide the development of specific programs in the violence prevention initiative.

St. Mary's has experience in programming to combat violence. In 2004, it launched a program funded by a CHI grant that helps young mothers and fathers become better parents. Called "Growing Great Kids in Southeast Nebraska," the initiative provides in-home visits and education for parents of children up to age 3.

Traci Reuter, healthy communities coordinator at St. Mary's, said outcomes show that the program has the ability to prevent child abuse and neglect. "Down the road, this can contribute to a reduction in violent behaviors in the community," she said. The program is a community partnership-based effort, developed by the hospital and a coalition called Partners for Otoe County, or P4OC.

Collaboration on solutions
In New Jersey, Saint Clare's also has experience in creating anti-violence programs tailored to its communities' needs. One was called "Girls Rule." Until its grant funding ran out, the program worked with troubled adolescent girls and their families to help them perform well in school and stay away from gangs and other dangerous influences.

Cynthia Lyons, director of community outreach for Saint Clare's, said the system has hired a consulting firm, QUAD 2 Consulting of Philadelphia, to assist in pursuing work on the $47,530 grant from CHI. Lyons said Saint Clare's staff and the consultants have contacted representatives of about 30 groups and will be meeting with them into the spring to discuss violence issues.

The groups include law enforcement, social services, other health agencies and community groups. Lyons said one of the things the grant will pay for is the opportunity to bring multiple organizations together at a conference center to explore their respective perspectives on causes of violence and useful interventions.

Initially Saint Clare's had expected to use the grant to expand its Girls Rule program or to emphasize programs aimed at preventing domestic violence. But Lyons said the hospital quickly decided to invite input from other community organizations on the front lines against violence.

"We decided to bring to the table as many as we can who deal with violence in our community," she said. "We want them to help us identify the two leading causes of violence in this community and, from that point, move forward to work on ideas of primary prevention. We didn't want to come out and say, for example, that we see gang violence as number one."

Sr. Evelyn said another reason for a free-ranging discussion is that Saint Clare's serves a wide variety of communities that may have substantially different issues of violence to deal with. Some of the communities are among the most affluent in the greater New York area. Dover, N.J., is 65 percent Latino. And some of northwestern New Jersey is still rural.

"What we are seeking is community collaboration," Sr. Evelyn said.

Copyright © 2010 by the Catholic Health Association of the United States
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