Last Updated on October 4, 2011 by pastor.rocklyn

The Youth Violence Systems Project (YVSP) is a study that incorporates academic, institutional and community perspectives on the interrelated causes of youth violence in Boston. Through a community learning process, YVSP is capturing the collective thoughts of three high-violence neighborhoods in Boston (Uphams Corner, Bowdoin-Geneva, and Grove Hall) regarding youth violence: who is involved, how is the violence committed, what are the tools involved, and why it happened. We are asking how violence is happening right now and, from that insight, evaluating causality. This community understanding is being combined with academic research and institutional data to create a virtual laboratory – or a computer model – that simulates the expected results of various intervention strategies on youth violence. The YVSP computer model will enable a cross-section of stakeholders – everyone from neighborhood youth to policy makers – to analyze the effectiveness of various youth violence intervention strategies (based on different assumptions) and engage in a higher quality of dialogue about these strategies.