About Us

Community-Academic Partnerships for Firearm Violence Prevention

The Community Firearm Violence Prevention Network is a National Institutes for Health (NIH) supported community-academic research collaboration working to prevent firearm violence across the United States through developing, implementing, and evaluating innovative community-based interventions. The Network consists of a Coordinating Center, Steering Committee, and multiple research projects testing community level prevention programs designed to address the structural causes of firearm violence, and prevent firearm and related violence, injury, and mortality.

What’s at stake

Firearm violence is the leading cause of death for children and adolescents in the United States, and has a disproportionate impact on communities of color as well as for sexual and gender minority and disability populations. Young Black Americans have the highest rate of gun homicide across any demographic group. These disparities align with communities that have historically been impacted through a lack of economic investment, and the structural discrimination that severely limits opportunities to address this violence.

While interventions are needed across all levels of the socio-ecological model and across multiple settings, the field of firearm injury prevention is in particular need of community-based interventions to address these disparities, address structural causes, and find solutions for the people that need them the most.

Community engaged research strategies offer the opportunity for participatory research development, evaluation, and implementation to involve community members and organizations in creating solutions to address this crisis.

Why a network?

Centralized

Centralizing the collective efforts of the Research Projects with the support of the Coordinating Center maximizes our efforts to address the structural causes of firearm violence and evaluate the effectiveness of community-level prevention strategies. As opposed to singular projects, our network generates more generalizable and impactful evidence of effective strategies that can reduce firearm violence in the most affected communities.

A centralized infrastructure creates opportunities for knowledge and data sharing, collaborative learning, and cross-project collaboration. Network coordination provides opportunities to harness the collective expertise of the Network to enhance methodological rigor and expand new avenues of scientific discovery. 

Collaborative

Collaboration and coordination across research teams implementing these interventions increases impact by enhancing the generalizability and applicability of findings. The collaboration and coordination of the network will improve our ability to understand the impact of these interventions and whether they can help other communities.

In addition, collaboration with communities across research sites helps enhance community voice and engagement by sharing lessons learned across the Network and providing guidance about best practices for genuine community engagement.  This is essential to ensure programs are responsive to cultural issues and local interests, address relevant disparities and equity issues, and are sustainable if found to be effective.

 

Creating Opportunities

Building a collaborative research network linking multiple independent studies has the potential to address existing capacity and data deficits, as well as rapidly accelerate the science of community firearm injury prevention. Our Network is connecting community practitioners and researchers from diverse areas who are able to learn from each other and provide mentorship to people recently joining the firearm injury prevention field. 

The Network provides opportunities to develop innovative multi-disciplinary solutions to firearm violence that can also be an important training ground for the next generation of researchers and community practitioners, and builds and nurtures a pipeline of firearm injury prevention scientists from diverse backgrounds.

Workgroups

The network engages and collaborates through workgroups led by the Coordinating Center on 4 key areas:

Data & Methods

01

The Data & Methods workgroup focuses on addressing research and statistical methods to improve the scientific rigor of the Network. This includes the alignment of measures and research collaborations to advance the science of the Network.

Community Engagement

02

The Community Engagement Workgroup works collaboratively to determine and measure the best practices and principles to conduct meaningful community-engaged research. This includes the development of case studies for each site, and a focus on creating opportunities in firearm violence prevention research.

Policy, Implementation & Economics

03

The Policy, Implementation and Economics Workgroup explores economic and implementation measures in the context of community-led interventions. This Workgroup also works together to identify and address policy barriers and opportunities to implement evidence-based research.

Communication & Dissemination

04

The Communication and Dissemination Workgroup focuses on opportunities to distribute the output of the Network. This includes development of podcasts, webinars, and news releases as well as journal and conference abstract submissions.