Youth-Adult Partnerships to Prevent Violence

Youth-adult partnerships in disadvantaged neighborhoods offer a promising approach for preventing community problems such as violence. While they differ slightly from traditional intergenerational programs that involve youth with older adults, they foster similar goals, including promoting relationships, mutual support, and community engagement. A social process called collective efficacy is developed when youth and adults trust one another and work together to solve problems. Research shows that collective efficacy is associated with lower levels of community crime and violence. This paper describes a community-based intervention for mobilizing and engaging residents to prevent violence by a facilitating youth-adult partnership to foster collective efficacy, including trusting relationships and the competencies needed to address neighborhood problems. This paper begins with a review of youth-adult partnerships and their successful characteristics, followed by how these partnerships influence the social processes important for developing collective efficacy and preventing violence. The characteristics of successful youth-adult partnerships are illustrated throughout the discussion of the community-based intervention. This paper demonstrates how to translate prior research on youth-adult partnerships and collective efficacy into actionable strategies that community practitioners and researchers can use to prevent community violence.