The Urban Youth Trauma Center: A Trauma-Informed Continuum for Addressing Community Violence Among Youth

Abstract

Contemporary community violence has escalated into a national public health crisis with urban youth, particularly ethnic minorities, suffering disproportionate negative impacts. The Urban Youth Trauma Center (UYTC) promotes a trauma-informed continuum of prevention-to-intervention services that combines community-based and clinic-based manualized protocols designed to reduce and prevent community violence for youth and families. Based on a socio-ecological model, UYTC has the main goals of addressing community violence and related traumatic stress as well as co-occurring conditions of substance abuse and disruptive behavior problems in urban youth by: (1) raising public awareness; (2) disseminating specialized trauma-informed training; and (3) mobilizing service system coalitions. UYTC employs this evidence-based yet flexible structure for disseminating, implementing, and evaluating trauma-informed training as a means of contributing to the reduction and prevention of community violence for low-income urban minority youth and families who bear the biggest burden of this current crisis.