Violence Prevention and Recovery: Lessons from Community Centered Initiatives

Community violence remains a significant concern in the United States, even though recent data show a decline in violent crime (Brown, 2025; Lopez & Boxerman, 2025). Research often focuses on the causes and consequences of community violence, as well as violence prevention efforts initiated by nonprofit and public organizations (Hjelm et. al., 2025; Mills, 2025). This roundtable elevates the myriad ways that communities engage in violence prevention and recovery efforts, underscoring lessons learned when strategies and programs center on community wisdom and voices.

Five studies anchor this roundtable, each addressing a different facet of community-engaged anti-violence practice. The presented studies will capture:

• A violence mitigation framework inductively developed from the work of 60 grassroots organizations focusing on youth engagement. The framework's interrelated components are: partnerships, conflict diversion, intergenerational communication, youth as leaders, indirect inclusion of trauma/mental health content, and culturally rooted collective care.
• An intervention co-created by community-based organizations, residents, and scholar-activists that includes a nine-week training program to facilitate collective efficacy, followed by a community-based prevention project. Key strategies include building on community strengths and connections, restorative non-violent bystander intervention, advocacy and organizing to address structural causes of violence, intergenerational engagement, and community resources.
• An assessment of how Latino-Hispanic individuals and groups engage with firearm safety practices and behaviors, with particular attention to culturally responsive initiatives, and the role of collective efficacy and empowerment in increasing engagement. Emphasis is placed on how firearm safety initiatives are shaped by social ecological factors, including concentrated disadvantage, language, and relationships with law enforcement and governing systems, as well as the importance of community-led solutions to increasing firearm safety engagement
• A project on policing and legal rights education through a culturally-responsive lens. The development and implementation of a “Know Your Rights” training used a participatory framework centered on refugee voices and leadership in navigating interactions with law enforcement and legal institutions, with particular attention paid to empowerment and the impact of policing and political violence.
• An ethnography that examines the extent of anti-environmental violence and the strategic responses of urban Mexican communities. This work looks at how pervasive violence creates an atmosphere of fear that creates both formal and informal strategies of violence prevention by community members. Relying both on informal whisper networks and on institutional alliances, community members work amid threats of violence.

Together, these studies involve research conducted with diverse communities, including Black working-class neighborhoods, Congolese refugees, Southwestern Latino-Hispanic communities, and Mexican city residents and ecologists. Further, this research illustrates the range of methodological approaches to conducting community-engaged research.

Following these presentations, we will engage attendees in a discussion on cross-cutting themes, including the importance of utilizing anti-oppressive frameworks; ethical considerations; various ways of supporting community capacity building; challenges in building authentic partnerships; funding challenges; and linking community efforts to broader systemic factors and policy logics. Attendees will be encouraged to share their violence prevention and community-engaged scholarship so that we can understand, support, and connect with each other’s work.