About the Seattle Youth Violence Prevention Initiative

Our Focus
Our Approach
Engaging Our Young People
Initiative Director
Three Neighborhood Networks
Accountability and Goals

Our Focus

The Seattle Youth Violence Prevention Initiative sets a new direction by identifying and helping young people who are at a vulnerable point in their lives.  Specifically, the Initiative invests $3.8 million annually to:

• Help youth with repeat offenses re-enter society from state and county detention programs.
• Provide alternatives for youth who are arrested for crimes, but released because they don't meet the admission criteria for county detention.
• Help middle-school truants and students at risk of suspension stay in school and succeed.
• Prevent victims of violence and their friends and relatives from continuing the cycle of violence through retaliation.

The Initiative doesn't  wait for youth to seek out help; Initiative staff and partners seek them out.  Whether it's helping them stay in school, re-enter society or manage their anger, the objective is to intervene at a crucial time in their lives and offer them a better path.

While Seattle has experienced some of the lowest overall crime rates in decades, the number of juvenile violent crime incidents has remained constant at about 800 a year. 

Our Approach

Initiative planners began by examining programs in Seattle and in cities across the nation including Boston, Baltimore, Chicago, San Jose, Washington D.C. and Lowell, Mass. 

Representatives from cities with proven strategies to decrease youth violence were invited to Seattle to share their innovative programs.  Baltimore's Operation Safe Kids used intensive outreach to juvenile offenders and saw a 44 percent drop in the number of youth re-arrested. "The lesson for Seattle is collaboration. You always need a strategy," advised Chris Williams, former director of Operation Safe Kids.

Penny Griffith, Executive Director of Columbia Heights/Shaw Family Support Collaborative, works with Latino youth and their parents in neighborhoods in Washington, D.C., where they dramatically reduced shootings and stabbings.  "The community got angry and said enough is enough," Griffith said.

Seattle's Initiative incorporates many of the ideas from these national models.  It proposes a new approach to street outreach with the use of violence interrupters who are privy to information on the street and may actually prevent violent acts and retaliation before they occur.  The street outreach team is led by the YMCA's Alive & Free Program.

Engaging Our Young People

Young people will be referred to a wide range of services through juvenile court, police, community outreach workers, schools, Seattle Parks and Recreation youth centers, and the neighborhood network agencies.

The Seattle Initiative calls for establishing extended hours at some youth centers, giving children a safe place to go, or be taken, to stay out of trouble.  In addition to case management, anger management and recreation programming, the City will support more community-based projects that engage and mentor young people.

In April 2009, school emphasis officers were assigned to four middle schools where they work to improve attendance and help children deal with conflict.  In summer of 2009 and 2010, the Initiative helped to fund summer youth employment, giving several hundred young people an opportunity to learn important job skills and putting them on a path for a better future. 

Even before the Initiative began, Seattle police stepped up emphasis patrols, working especially closely with schools, and doubled the number of officers working in the gang unit.

Initiative Director

In April 2009, Mariko Lockhart was selected as the inaugural director of the Initiative. Lockhart was president and state director of Communities In Schools of New Jersey, a statewide nonprofit focused on coordinated, school-based support services to reduce dropouts. Lockhart coordinates the overall Initiative and works with the three network coordinators, collaborating on outreach, intake and referral, and data collection and analysis. 

Three Neighborhood Networks

One message came through loud and clear from representatives in other cities:  Government should not dictate all the details of a plan.  The City of Seattle has been very deliberate in setting the direction and goals, but asking communities to help determine what's needed in their neighborhoods.

Initiative efforts are coordinated through three neighborhood networks in southeast, southwest and central Seattle, where indicators of future violent behaviors, such as discipline rates in schools, are the highest.  The lead agencies are Therapeutic Health Services for the central network; Southwest Youth and Family Services; and a consortium of agencies in the southeast network led by Rainier Vista Boys and Girls Club.

These youth-focused, community-led networks serve as hubs to coordinate and tailor services around each youth, including outreach, case management, family support, anger management, youth employment and pre-apprenticeships, recreation, school emphasis officers, emphasis patrols and community matching grant projects to engage youth in positive, pro-social activities.

Accountability and Goals

Simply tracking how much money is spent and how many young people receive services is not a meaningful measure of success.  Seattle's Youth Violence Prevention Initiative will include strict measures of accountability at two levels – whether neighborhoods and schools are safer, and whether individual lives are transformed as measured by indicators, such as school performance and recidivism.

The Initiative is charged to achieve:

• A fifty percent reduction in juvenile violent crime court referrals in the three network neighborhoods.
• A fifty percent reduction in the number of suspensions/expulsions due to violent incidents in five selected middle schools.

City staff manage contracting for many of the services provided in the plan and research best practices in each category of funding to assure that interventions are appropriate and effective for the populations served by the Initiative.