An ecological approach to reducing community violence
Community violence interventions (CVIs) are increasingly positioned as public health alternatives to punitive approaches to violence, centering prevention, harm reduction, and healing. Although evidence suggests CVIs can reduce violence, less is known about the psychological and social mechanisms driving change and how they should inform program design. Involvement in violence can be understood as an adaptation to cumulative adversity across interconnected individual, relational, and neighborhood contexts. This talk advances Bronfenbrenner's Ecological Systems Theory as a framework for strengthening CVI design and evaluation, using Project Restore—a participatory intervention co-developed with formerly gang-involved individuals—as a case example, demonstrating how an ecologically grounded approach clarifies how interventions operate.
Jarrell Daniels is a distinguished Community Organizer, National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, and the visionary Founder of the Justice Ambassadors Youth Council (JAYC) at Columbia University’s Center for Justice. Currently a Doctoral student in Psychology and Social Intervention at New York University, his research interests center on social change processes—specifically, how change occurs across systems and institutions, as well as how individuals develop and change over time through interpersonal and setting-level interventions.
Dr. Geraldine Downey has been chair of the Columbia Psychology Department, Vice-Provost for Diversity Initiatives, Vice-Dean of Arts and Sciences, and Dean of Social Sciences. Her main interest is the study of personal and status-based rejection. In her current work, she is exploring people's expectations of rejection and their impact on the perception of other people's behavior, in anticipation of and following social encounters.
