Artwork stating 'Education Destroys Barriers', 'We Demand Treatment', and 'I Need A Chance'

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  • Get There Fast or Safe? A Crowdsourced Map Gives You the Option

    In 71 cities around the world, users of the My Safetipin mobile app can decide whether to visit a particular neighborhood or plan a travel route based on how safe others deem those places. While the 100,000 or so users, more than half in India, constitute too small a user base to make the mapping app truly universal, its crowdsourced data already have prompted the Delhi and Bogota governments to improve street lighting on streets deemed unsafe because they are not well lit. The app's primary goal is to make the streets safer for women.

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  • Food insecurity linked to gun violence. In St. Louis, Black farmers work on a solution

    Black, urban farmers have formed a grassroots "ecosystem" to grow and distribute fresh, affordable produce in St. Louis neighborhoods where food insecurity and gun violence go hand in hand. Heru Urban Farming is a startup businesses and CSA growing vegetables in vacant lots that it then sells by subscription and gives away to families in need. Along with a new farmers market and a mobile produce vendor, the "food justice" activists and entrepreneurs are meeting a nutritional need where quality supermarkets don't exist and corner stores typically sell packaged, processed foods.

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  • Safe Streets celebrates a year with no homicides in a South Baltimore area they serve, with hope for rest of the city

    South Baltimore's Cherry Hill neighborhood enjoyed its third homicide-free year since the violence intervention program Safe Streets began operation. While a formal evaluation of the program's nine neighborhood sites is yet to be completed, community members credit it with lowering violence by putting "violence interrupters" on the scene of conflict or in hospitals to counsel gunshot victims against retaliation. Safe Streets mediated more than 400 disputes in Cherry Hill in the past year, most of them involving people armed with guns and likely to commit violence. Violence citywide has remained high.

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  • How Does Treating Gun Violence As A Public Health Crisis Work? One Bronx Program Offers A Potential Flagship Model

    Stand Up to Violence is the only street-outreach gun-violence-prevention program in New York that centers its work in hospitals. Street outreach is a policing alternative that uses former gang members and formerly incarcerated people to intervene before arguments turn deadly. Hospital-based intervention work puts counselors and mediators at gunshot victims' bedside to start the intervention, and offers of services, at the earliest stage. In a four-year span, the areas covered by Stand Up, based at Jacobi Medical Center, saw many fewer shootings and instances where victims got shot again.

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  • In Egypt, online group Qawem saving hundreds of women from sextortion

    The Egyptian Facebook group Qawem (Arabic for resist) helps victims of sextortion by turning threats around to target the attacker. Sextortion, in which threatened disclosure of a person's nude or other embarrassing photos are used as a tool of extortion, is illegal in Egypt. But women – the typical victims – are often reluctant to report incidents to the police, out of shame or fear. When victims report sextortion attempts to Qawem, volunteers counsel the victims while other volunteers track down the extortionists and threaten to expose them to their family or friends. About 200 cases per week get resolved.

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  • A cure for violence

    In the Boston area, the Roca organization intervenes before young men commit violence. Its "relentless outreach" approach is based on cognitive behavioral therapy, an approach that helps people recognize and change their destructive behavior and learn new skills to cope with conflict and stress – essential to keeping impulsive young men, many the victims of violent trauma, from committing violence. Researchers see evidence that the program, which has spread throughout the metro area and to Baltimore, makes people less likely to get arrested and more likely to get a job.

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  • If We Can Soar: What Birmingham Roller Pigeons Offer the Men of South Central

    The Black Country Roller Club and its founder, Cornell Norwood, fostered a subculture in Los Angeles' South Central neighborhoods among Black men who broke the color barrier in competitive pigeon husbandry. Besides the success they found in their hobby of breeding and raising roller pigeons, known for their distinctive aerial acrobatic talents, the young men and boys drawn to this world found mutual support "in times of flux and instability," and a meritocracy that provided meditative benefits: "a more organic form of the Big Brother program, and a culturally sensitive outlet for mental health."

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  • Wichita couple overcomes drug addiction, creates organization for teens

    Rise Up for Youth is a program built into some Wichita schools that works to keep teenagers out of gangs and helps them focus on positive changes in their community. There are two programs — one for males called the Brotherhood and one for females called Sisterhood – which encourage teens to keep busy and find activities that give them a natural high. Participants visit prisons, talk with police and people coming out of incarceration, and make college visits. Since the program started, 100% of student participants have graduated from high school and many have gone on to college and have successful careers.

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  • Inside One Baltimore Group's Effort to Stop Youth Violence Before It Starts

    Baltimore's Roca program uses cognitive behavioral therapy, and patience and persistence, to work at changing the thinking of young people at high risk of committing or suffering gun violence. Counselors help their clients examine the trauma in their lives, learn to change their reactions to stress and conflict, and to choose legitimate jobs over the street economy. Unlike violence interruption programs that seek to mediate crises just as they threaten to turn deadly, Roca does its work further upstream, seeking to shape interactions before they turn critical.

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  • Cómo se trabaja en los barrios pobres de Argentina para reducir el consumo de drogas

    La Federación Hogar de Cristo, una red creada por sacerdotes católicos, agrupa a 190 centros barriales de 19 provincias de Argentina y ha ayudado a más de 20.000 personas a tratar sus adicciones. Lo hacen desde 2008 y no han parado ni en pandemia.

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