SANTA CRUZ COUNTY
YOUTH VIOLENCE
PREVENTION NETWORK
*Special Edition*
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Equity Timeline & Emerging Youth-Led Efforts
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Youth Violence Prevention Network (YVPN) and our allies hold inclusion, equity, and racial justice at the center of all our work. We strive towards a more equitable and united county where young people have the opportunity to succeed and are engaged in family, school, and in their community. We do this by creating connections between community members and system leaders, building the capacity of Network members to better meet the needs of youth and families, and sharing resources with the community.
This timeline highlights the strides Youth Violence Prevention Network and Project Thrive have made towards equity in Santa Cruz County. These events were in collaboration with Santa Cruz County's Youth Violence Prevention Network, Applied Survey Research, Community Action Board of Santa Cruz County, Santa Cruz County Office Of Education, Santa Cruz County Behavioral Health Services, Santa Cruz County Probation, United Way of Santa Cruz County, Watsonville Police Department, and through countless in-kind contributions from YVPN members.
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2015
James Bell: YVPN hosted two community forums where James Bell, with the W. Haywood Burns Institute, focused on Racial and Ethnic Disparities in the Justice and Education Systems. The goal of the events were to begin normalizing the need to have conversations on race and the importance of using data to inform decision-making and to shift policies. Community members, youth, families & systems-leaders attended.
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Trauma-Informed Systems Conference: This conference allowed attendees to identify gaps in the services they provide and gain tools from experts to shift to consistent, culturally responsive trauma-informed care systems to increase the well-being of Black and Latinx males and their families, who have been impacted by violence. Specific workshops focused on trauma-informed systems 101, restorative justice in schools, the impacts of trauma on law enforcement, and trauma-informed principles for healthcare providers. Over 175 systems leaders attended.
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Our community is committed to being culturally responsive, but many organizations cited lacking tangible tools to make that happen. 68 systems leaders came together to gain better understanding as to how to shift their organizations to be more equitable and culturally responsive. Workshop participants grappled with developing Equity Teams, strategies for Board engagement, shifting hiring practices & staff development, ways to increase community voice in decision-making and how to use data in a meaningful way.
Acknowledging that youth of color experience disparate outcomes in every-youth serving system including, law enforcement due to implicit bias, YVPN hosted a training to combat implicit bias. Co-Sponsored by the Watsonville Police Department, this event allowed attendees to identify the impacts that implicit bias has on decision making within the organizations. Participants also developed action plans for how to counter implicit bias within their work, as it relates the outcomes for young men of color and their families.
Restorative Justice Forum: In November 2018, partnership with Smart on Crime, YVPN co-hosted a community forum, which brought some of the nation’s foremost experts on restorative justice to Santa Cruz to raise awareness about the advantages of this approach to criminal justice decision-making and to stimulate discussion about whether and how to implement restorative justice practices at the local level. More than 175 community members attended the event, and over 50 community leaders representing community, education, government, health, and justice sectors attended the pre-event reception. From this event, Santa Cruz County applied for Proposition 47 funding to support the development of the new Neighborhood Courts Model. We have also seen a building momentum to increase restorative practices through out the justice and educational systems.
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YVPN, in partnership with a wide array of systems partners and motivated community volunteers, saw a need to increase trust and strengthen relationships between youth, community members and law enforcement. Santa Cruz County was selected by Everyday Democracy to act as a pilot community, for implementing the Dialogues for Change process. The dialogues model was used as a tool where community members, youth and law enforcement participated and took part in activities that built trust, provided opportunities to share honestly, learned about an issue and worked together on solutions and action. From this project, we hope that his energy and knowledge will continue to drive forward collaborative action for positive community change.
Leadership Cohort for Advancing Equity & Cultural Responsivity:
YVPN is committed to increasing equity and cultural responsivity and shifting from commitment in intention to commitment in action. In order support equitable systems change efforts, YVPN created a learning community to support leaders to reflect on the skills they needed to lead from an equitable trauma-informed lens; created space for them to explore and problem-solve implementation challenges that inevitably will arise when building equitable organizations and systems, and provided leaders a place to discuss difficulties, get support, and offer and receive peer-to-peer support.
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YVPN has also been proactively engaging with emerging youth-led grassroots efforts that are committed to creating equitable communities.
Some of these include*:
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Blended Bridge: serves as an intermediary between differences in attempt to allow us to better understand one another. Their goal is to create a safe inclusive community that welcomes every individual for who they are and what they identify as. Learn more about their recent collaborative efforts to support CZU wildfire relief on their Instagram!
- Register for their newsletter & new book club!
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Black Youth Empowerment Workshop: led by Santa Cruz High Alum, Chloe Gentile-Montgomery, is currently hosting a virtual workshop for Black Youth where they can discuss topics, movements, and history from the Black Community.
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Fuerza Latinx: website for resources and tips for Latinx youth on their path to higher education. Striving to achieve equity within our communities. In recent efforts, they provided 140 backpacks and back to school supplies for the Beach Flats Youth Community!
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Nest Corps: Youth led organizing lead by Digital Nest to tackle problems that our community is struggling with. Projects have ranged from supporting virtual learning, UndocuFund, the Solidarity Coalition and many more!
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NAACP UCSC: the mission of the NAACP Youth & College Division is to inform youth of the problems affecting racial and ethnic minorities and their harmonious cooperation with other peoples; to stimulate an appreciation of the African Diaspora and other people of color's contribution to civilization; to develop an intelligent militant effective youth leadership. Check out their Instagram to learn more about the work they are doing!
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PVUSD_Deserve: Youth-led organizers that use the power of community driven date to support students in the Pajaro Unified School District. They have also recently mobilized efforts to support farm worker families and are building a Community Advisory Committee to focus on climate-related work and future development planning projects.
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Santa Cruz County Student Leadership: Santa Cruz County student leaders supporting other students in having a vision for themselves and our community. This program is ran through the Santa Cruz County Office of Education. They are currently looking for youth to apply to their new youth council: Youth for Environmental Action. Click here to apply!
*This is not an exhaustive list; we encourage you to share stories and organizations that we can connect with in the future! We are also actively engaging other our current youth serving partners within our Network as well.
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As we look into the future, YVPN is committed to moving forward with equity, justice, wellbeing, and dignity at the center of all our work. We are consistently striving for synergistic alignment with partner organizations, creating unanimous goals to effectively support Youth in Santa Cruz County.
YVPN is continuing to focus on collaboration, reducing duplication of efforts and working in silos, and partnering with other organizations to leverage resources for greater impact. This focus will lead to Youth being life, college and career ready; Youth being supported by caring adults; Youth are valued have meaningful participation in their community; the community is culturally and racially aware and responsive, and the community is safe and thriving. In addition to these focus areas, we are deeply committed to supporting equitable systems-change work, and, importantly, interweaving equity in all our future programs, initiatives, and partnerships.
Elevating Youth voice holds utmost importance in all future activities. We are committed to listening, amplifying, and including Youth voices in decision making. By working with and learning from Youth, increasing synergistic partnerships with others to leverage resources and increase capacity, and consistently keeping our commitment to our core values, we look to a brighter, safer, and more equitable future ahead.
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Interested in learning more about how we plan to move forward! Register for our event today!
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YVPN Coordinator
Amanda Gamban
Project Thrive Coordinator
Ruben Garcia Jr
831.465.2211
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4450 Capitola Rd, Ste 106
Capitola, CA 95010
PHONE | [831.479.5466]
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Follow us on Facebook & Instagam
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