Disrupting Street Conflict: Evaluating More Life's Ability to Deter Street Violence and Victimization

Background: Individuals at the highest risk of gun violence involvement often avoid—or find themselves locked out of—many of the systems designed to mitigate violence and its pernicious effects. This population is comprised largely of young, minority men who have aged out or were pushed out of school, who were failed by the child welfare system, and who come into frequent contact with the criminal legal system. Understandably, these men report high levels of cynicism toward the legal, educational, and healthcare systems. For these reasons and more, such “high-risk” individuals constitute a “hard-to-reach” population often requiring a comprehensive set of services alleviating both immediate personal challenges—like housing, food, or healthcare—and more entrenched inequities caused by years of trauma, disenfranchisement, and poverty.

Methods: This paper focuses on qualitative findings from a larger mixed-method study conducted at More Life (ML), a violence prevention program in Chicago. The purpose of this study is to investigate how the program impacts individual, group, and community level outcomes—including: (a) changes in levels of violence and victimizations, (b) educational and employment outcomes, and (c) general process-related outcomes and experiences of participants. We conducted field observations and in-depth interviews aimed at highlighting the rich, nuanced accounts of participants’ lives and program experiences. Through these baseline interviews, we explore ML participants’:

1. Experiences, opinions, and beliefs surrounding the program, including their relationships with program staff.
2. Narratives about their lives and neighborhoods, and how these narratives relate to their decision to participate in the program; and

3. Backgrounds and histories, to understand the multitude of contextual factors that may hinder or facilitate program progress and success.

Results: Findings are based on our 19 Wave 1 interviews with newly enrolled ML participants, as well as insights from more than 16 months of ongoing field observations that uncovered participants’ motivations for choosing ML. Utilizing open-ended thematic coding, themes that arose included personal and psychological impulses; ML’s group-level engagement strategy; participants’ social networks; intentional, strategic street outreach from ML staff; and ongoing street conflicts and vicarious exposure to violence. We dug into these themes and discovered a number of factors that lead participants to joining ML and how the program has impacted there outside lives, as well as family and communal relationships. Participants also cited the welcoming, family-like energy at ML sites--and professional, educational, and personal goals--as reasons they remained in the program.

Conclusions/Implications: The findings reported here offer an important baseline understanding of how participants’ experiences with violence relate to both the way in which they navigate their neighborhoods and social networks, and how they receive programs—like ML—designed to mitigate violence’s impact on their lives. These findings highlight key insights into the reasons why participants decide to enroll in and remain responsive to ML and its services. The longitudinal nature of this qualitative evaluation relies heavily on this baseline data to track and understand shifts in participants’ attitudes, goals, and behaviors over the course of the larger study.