Baltimore Health Dept, Youth Violence Prevention Internships

Overview

Baltimore City Health Department (BCHD) established the Office of Youth Violence Prevention (OYVP) in 2002.  OYVP's mission is to combat the epidemic of violence among Baltimore's young people through innovative public health programming and policy initiatives. 

OYVP collaborates with governmental and community partners to facilitate services not only for youth served by OYVP programs but also to implement strategies that improve service access for youth of similar backgrounds.  OYVP is a part of the Baltimore City Violence Reduction Plan which aims to reduce violent crime and strengthen public trust through a three-pronged approach of Targeted Enforcement, Community Engagement and Building Strong Partnerships. OYVP operates three prevention programs: Safe Streets Baltimore, Operation Safe Kids, and Dating Matters.  

Safe Streets Baltimore, the highly successful, evidence-based initiative created by the School of Public Health at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Safe Streets aims to reduce the incidence of violence, change community norms, provide alternatives to violence, and increase the perceived risks and costs of involvement in violence. This is done through the five core components of the model: community mobilization, outreach, public education, faith-based leader involvement, and criminal justice participation. Outreach and high-risk conflict mediation are, together, perhaps the most important aspects of Safe Streets. Safe Streets depends heavily on a strong public education campaign to instill in people the message that shootings and violence are not acceptable. Finally, it calls for the strengthening of communities so they have the capacity to exercise informal social control and respond to issues that affect them. The intervention targets high-risk Baltimore City youth aged 14 to 25 years, through outreach and service connection, and the community as a whole, through a media campaign and community mobilization. Progress towards goals will be measured through reductions in shootings.

Operation Safe Kids is a collaboration between BCHD, Department of Juvenile Services (DJS) and other State and City agencies to provide intensive community-based case management and monitoring to approximately 370 juvenile offenders annually ages 10-20.  OSK is merged with DJS's Violence Prevention Initiative to serve youth identified as highest risk for becoming perpetrators or victims of violence.  Fifteen Youth Development Technicians (YDTs) visit each youth twice and their guardian once on a weekly basis to provide informal counseling, improve probation compliance, and connect youth and families to services. Two Licensed Clinical Social Workers provide clinical oversight to cases, perform initial assessments, and supervise YDTs. 

Dating Matters was developed as a comprehensive public health approach to the primary prevention of teen dating violence. It has been developed based on best available science and practice, and utilizes a combination of evidence-informed and evidence-based strategies. Safe Dates, the parent curricula, is evidence-based and is designed to equip parents with skills to communi­cate with their child about dating violence and use positive parenting skills. Parent programs target the following risk factors: harsh parenting, low parental monitoring, negative parent-child interac­tions, and witnessing violence in the home. Dating Matters, the student curricula, is an evidence-informed curricula, developed for this initiative, takes into account best practices in prevention, a devel­opmental conceptualization of youth relationships, and are informed by other evidence-based youth health curricula. Each component was selected for specific purpose and reinforces messages by giving complementary skills to youth, their peers, parents, and educators, and supports these skills with policy.

Internship

The internship opportunity with the Office of Youth Violence Prevention is an opportunity to obtain knowledge about youth violence prevention programs and resources in Baltimore City as well as improve professional development skills.

Tasks would include:

• Working with Directors of youth violence prevention programs to develop, organize and coordinator program activities
• Researching community resources available for program use
• Working on special projects that improve program productivity and/or efficiency
• Promoting and providing information to the community regarding program activities and resources
• Assisting in the formulation of data collection methodology
• Assisting with collecting, compiling and reviewing data and statistics on the programs for use in proposals, presentations and recommendations

The Office of Youth Violence Prevention is seeking an individual who has an interest in working with youth violence prevention programs. Qualified candidates for the internship would be self-starters, well organized and flexible.

Internship hours would be during the regular work week, Monday - Friday. Internship schedule would be based on the selected candidate's availability.

TO APPLY, submit a cover letter and resume to Bmoreyvp@baltimorecity.gov by Friday, December 14th, 2012.  Applicants are encouraged to submit their information early as applications will be reviewed and interviews scheduled on an on-going basis.