Cure Violence Global

Cure Violence Global has two primary goals:
1. Reduce violence
2. Shift public thinking, policy, and practice on violence

Reduce Violence
Cure Violence Global (CVG) was founded to help cities and communities reduce violence and killings through a health-based perspective that addresses the disease-like spread of violent behavior. CVG is a community-oriented, guiding, and technical assistance organization that works with local governments and organizations to implement its epidemic control approach to interrupting the transmission and spread of violence. This approach is evidence-based, with more than 20 evaluations and studies showing 30% to 60% reductions in violence.

Shift public thinking, policy, and practice on violence
CVG intends to fundamentally change the discourse on and approach to violence from the prevailing paradigm that understands violence as moral corruption or human failing and applies punitive strategies to address it to one that includes an understanding and addressing violence as a health condition. To do so, we must activate voices and resources throughout the health system and cultivate violence prevention as a health sector responsibility and imperative.

Goal 1: Reducing violence:
• Refining the model through research and development
• Adapting the model to other forms of violence
• Implementing in targeted cities until Cure Violence is accepted as “regular practice”
• Establishing a global interruption network

Goal 2: Shifting Public thinking to the new paradigm
• Developing a systematic campaign in the US leading to the institutionalization of the practice
• Creating a global network centered around a common mission: reducing violence through a health epidemic approach internationally

Violence is a significant problem globally, and Cure Violence Global (CVG)is well-positioned to play an important role in reducing violence globally. Over the last 25 years, CVG has developed, refined, and demonstrated the effectiveness of an approach to reducing violence that focuses on detecting and interrupting conflicts, identifying and changing behaviors for those at the highest risk for violence, and shifting community norms. This community-based health approach has been proven to be effective by more than 20 evaluations and reports, with 40% to 60% reductions in violence.

The Cure Violence approach has been independently evaluated many times and found to be effective in substantially reducing violence in communities in Chicago, Baltimore, New York, Philadelphia, Ciudad Juárez, Capetown, Halifax, Port of Spain, and more. Several Cure Violence communities have gone a year or more without a shooting, including in highly violent areas in Baltimore, New York, San Pedro Sula, and Ciudad Juárez.

CVG provides comprehensive, customized training, technical assistance, and subject matter expertise in the Cure Violence approach to local partners implementing the approach. Over the past two decades, CVG has provided an array of Training and Technical Assistance (TTA) to more than 100 communities in over 15 countries. CVG is currently engaged in assessments or the delivery of TTA in 28 cities in the US and 13 cities in Mexico, Honduras, Colombia, Trinidad, Jamaica, and Somalia. CVG has administered online and in-person training for multiple constituencies, among them community organizations looking to implement CVG; intensive assistance in implementation; management training; interrupter and outreach training; elections and protests training; trauma care training; and media training.

CVG’s training team brings more than 50 years of violence prevention delivery and training experience and a wealth of real-world, lived experience, having grown up in and worked in communities hardest hit by violence. For many, this experience includes interactions with police, prison time, and other criminal justice system experiences.

More than twenty years ago, Cure Violence Global (CVG) pioneered the use of the public health approach to interrupt and reduce violence. The first Cure Violence program was launched in West Garfield Park, Chicago, in 2000, one of the most violent communities in the US, and was quick to produce results, reducing shootings by 67% in its first year. Starting in 2008, Cure Violence Global began working with partners in new regions in the United States, including Baltimore, New York City, New Orleans, and Kansas City. Several additional evaluations have been conducted on these replication sites, including in New York City (63% reduction in shootings), Baltimore (56% reduction in killings), and Philadelphia (30% reduction in shootings). Currently, Cure Violence Global is working in close partnership with organizations in more than 70 communities across 22 US cities to implement the approach, with more than ten additional cities implementing approaches inspired by the Cure Violence model.

Also, in 2008, Cure Violence Global began its first international adaptation of the methodology in Basra and Sadr City, Iraq. Since then, international programs have been implemented in Argentina (Rosario, Santa Fe), Canada (Halifax and First Nation Territories in Alberta), Colombia (Cali), El Salvador (San Salvador, San Pedro Mazawal), Guatemala (Guatemala City), Honduras (San Pedro Sula, La Ceiba, Tegucigalpa), Jamaica (St. Catherine North, St. James), Mexico (Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua City, Culiacan), South Africa (Cape Town), Trinidad & Tobago (Port of Spain), and the United Kingdom (London).

Throughout these years, Cure Violence has also provided training in violence prevention techniques to representatives of the UN, international organizations, governments, NGOs, and communities from dozens of other countries. These adaptations have addressed violence not only in different countries and cultures but also multiple types of violence, such as cartel violence, sectarian and tribal violence, and election violence, in settings including conflict zones, prisons, refugee camps, juvenile detention facilities, and schools, demonstrating that violence in most settings can be both seen and successfully treated - and that the epidemiologic approach can be successfully adapted across geographies and types or "syndromes" of the disease of violence. The Cure Violence approach has been implemented in more than 50 cities across more than 15 countries in 5 continents.