# National Center of Excellence in Youth Violence Prevention: The Denver Community-Level Collaborative

> **NIH ALLCDC U01** · UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO · 2020 · $1,213,751

## Abstract

Project Summary
Preventing and reducing the risk for youth violence remains a significant challenge for communities across the
country. Researchers have consistently called for a coordinated, comprehensive public health response to
youth violence, but our nation lacks the prevention infrastructure to put this approach into place – particularly in
high-burden urban communities. This project is designed to provide a replicable roadmap for building this
infrastructure at the community-level. The Denver Youth Violence Prevention Center (DYVPC) builds from the
efforts of our current YVPC, Montbello’s Steps to Success project, which focuses on evaluating a data-driven
multi-faceted approach to youth violence prevention. We bring together a multidisciplinary team of researchers,
practitioners, and community partners to implement and evaluate a prevention system that delivers community-
and policy-level youth violence prevention strategies matched to local need in two high-burden Denver
communities. DYVPC activities include: (1) working in collaboration with community partners in two high-
burden Denver communities with different levels of readiness to implement Communities That Care (CTC) – an
evidence-based, community-level prevention system that provides a data-driven framework for community
decision-making. For this project, CTC will focus on the selection and implementation of community-level
prevention strategies and policies that best address community needs, values, and resources; (2) enacting a
policy change in violence screening through routine health care settings to identify high-risk youth and match
them to evidence-based interventions; (3) conducting an implementation process evaluation to measure
community readiness and capacity to build a local prevention infrastructure and monitor implementation fidelity
of the community-level prevention system; (4) using multiple quasi-experimental designs to evaluate changes
in (a) neighborhood social processes and characteristics that may be influenced by the community-level
prevention system and selected community- and policy-level prevention strategies and (b) rates of youth
violence; (5) developing an implementation roadmap for future replication and scalability both locally and
nationally. The sites participating in this study are two high-burden Denver residential neighborhoods,
Montbello and Northeast Park Hill, with rates of violent activity and violent behaviors that are significantly
greater than the national average. This study will enhance the body of research that focuses on effective
community- and policy-level prevention strategies, contribute to understanding the relationship between
community readiness/capacity and prevention strategy implementation outcomes, and examine how effective
community-level strategies impact neighborhood social processes and conditions. Additionally, this project has
the potential to advance understanding of community-level violence prevention efforts through...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10004546
- **Project number:** 5U01CE002757-05
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO
- **Principal Investigator:** Beverly E. Kingston
- **Activity code:** U01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** ALLCDC
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $1,213,751
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2016-09-30 → 2021-09-29

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10004546

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10004546, National Center of Excellence in Youth Violence Prevention: The Denver Community-Level Collaborative (5U01CE002757-05). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10004546. Licensed CC0.

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