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City's new community-violence prevention manager outlines plan to coordinate interventions and measure impact
Summary
Sanithia White, Community Violence Prevention Manager, described efforts to connect intervention providers, build organizational capacity and develop data-driven metrics; she proposed hiring a services liaison and a family services specialist to improve continuity of care and help organizations document outcomes.
Sanithia White, Community Violence Prevention Manager for the City of Newport News, briefed the council on April 8 about work to coordinate the city's community violence intervention (CVI) ecosystem and to develop data-driven measures of program impact.
White described CVI as "connecting those who have the closest relationships to those who are or present the greatest risk of being impacted by violence or those who are already actively engaged in violence." Her goal is to strengthen organizational capacity, streamline referrals and establish assessment measures that show whether interventions make people better off.
The nut graf: White said the strategy will prioritize targeted prevention and intervention in areas of highest need, connect credible messengers and hospital-based violence-intervention programs, and ensure funded organizations can demonstrate outcomes with quantitative and qualitative data.
White said she has held more than 35 meetings with individual organizations and completed a community conversation series to gather "collective insight" on gaps and coordination needs. Next steps she listed include hiring a services liaison and a family services specialist to improve continuity of services from intervention to family-level supports. She said data collection and evaluation will be central: "At the end of the day we want to say is anyone any better off and so as we work with the organizations we will be very very intentional to make sure that we'll be able to answer that question at some level," White said.
Council members asked about linking existing programs such as the gun-violence intervention program and hospital-based initiatives; White said those elements are part of the ecosystem graphic she provided and that the office will intentionally meet with both funded and non-funded organizations to identify capacity and referral gaps.
Less critical details: White observed that domestic violence increased nationwide during COVID and that the city's gun-violence work frequently involves people who know each other rather than random acts; she said she will coordinate with police and other public-safety partners when cases cross program boundaries.
