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New community violence prevention manager outlines data-driven plan to coordinate services
Summary
Sunithia White, the city's community violence prevention manager, described the Community Violence Intervention (CVI) ecosystem and plans to build organizational capacity, streamline referrals and measure outcomes to ensure resources reach high-risk individuals and families.
Sunithia White, community violence prevention manager for Newport News, told the City Council on April 8 that her office's priority is coordinating the city's Community Violence Intervention (CVI) ecosystem to connect high-risk individuals rapidly to services.
"It's essentially connecting those who have the closest relationships to those who are or present the greatest risk of being impacted by violence," White said, explaining the CVI approach. She described efforts the office has taken since her start: reviewing existing programs, holding stakeholder conversations and running a community conversation series to collect insight on gaps and opportunities.
White said the office will focus on building organizational capacity, streamlining processes to reduce redundancy and improving data collection to measure program outcomes. "At the end of the day, we want to say, Is anyone any better off?" she said, noting the importance of quantitative and qualitative measures to support future funding requests.
Planned steps White named include hiring a services liaison to work directly with organizations to improve service delivery and a family services specialist to engage household members beyond individual clients. She said targeted prevention and intervention in high-need areas and for individuals at highest risk will be prioritized over only broad prevention efforts.
Council members asked how the CVI office would coordinate with existing programs such as the hospital violence intervention program and funded community partners. White said she had held more than 35 meetings with organizations, including funded and unfunded groups, and that the office would deliberately connect credible messengers, hospital intervention teams and responders to available services so they can reach clients efficiently.
Ending: White said the office will use national best practices and research-based models to develop metrics and will work to make program results clear and defensible when seeking future resources.
