Bronzeville Communities That Care

The CCYVP has long-standing relationships with many neighborhoods in Chicago. In 2015, the Center began a partnership with Bright Star Community Outreach, a community-based organization in the Bronzeville neighborhood, located in southeast Chicago. In the early 20th century, Bronzeville was known as the “Black Metropolis,” one of the nation’s most significant landmarks of African-American urban history. By 1950, Bronzeville was the center of Black Chicago and, along with Harlem, NY, an economic and cultural capital of Black America. However, Bronzeville’s population and economic base have since declined significantly, resulting in lost services and opportunities. More than a third of residents now live in poverty, and in 2016, the overall violent crime rate in Bronzeville was twice the Chicago average.

In an effort to stem this violence, researchers from the CCYVP work with the community to implement the Communities That Care (CTC) model. The CTC structure engages the community as partners to define the problem, and identify and implement evidence-based solutions that reduce violence and promote healthy development for children, youth and families.

The CCYVP is led through a collaboration among the University of Chicago, Bright Star Community Outreach, and Northwestern University. The CCYVP also brings together faith and other organizations to build community by empowering area residents to pool resources and form partnerships. This unique academic-community partnership helps the CCYVP determine:

• How to better use knowledge gained through research to inform community violence prevention
• Ways to ensure the knowledge and experience of people living and working in the community are an integral part of the research and program delivery process

Through the CTC process, the CCYVP will work with community leaders to use data to identify, implement and evaluate existing and new community-led violence-prevention programs.

To evaluate the impact of the CTC model in Bronzeville, the CCYVP will:

• Assess the impact of CTC on social and behavioral processes via a neighborhood survey.
• Analyze how changes driven by the community coalition affect multiple forms of violence among youth, such as teen dating and intimate partner violence.
• Estimate the impact of CTC on school- and community-level crime and violence via student and neighborhood surveys and archival crime records.