About Us


About Us

Overview
The Center on Culture, Immigration, and Youth Violence Prevention (the Center) is a project of the Institute for the Study of Social Change, the National Council on Crime and Delinquency (NCCD), the University of California, Berkeley’s School of Law (Boalt Hall), and the University of California, San Francisco. The Center is one of eight Academic Centers for Excellence nationwide funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to address youth violence.

Other Center partners include researchers from local institutions, community organizations, and state, local, and federal agencies.

The Center’s goal is to reduce youth violence, especially among Asian/Pacific Islander (API) and Latino immigrant populations in Oakland, California.

The Center was preceded by the Asian & Pacific Islander Youth Violence Prevention Center (API Center), a collaboration between NCCD and the University of Hawai’i from 2000 to 2005 that was funded by the CDC. Accomplishments of the API Center include a risk and protective factors survey of approximately 800 API youth and parents/guardians, community mobilization efforts in Oakland, San Francisco, and Waipahu, HI, and numerous publications.


Mission

  • To research the causes and prevention of youth violence, focusing on API and Latino immigrant populations in Oakland.
  • To enhance community capacity to prevent and reduce youth violence through data gathering, information dissemination, and youth and community involvement.
  • To provide a gathering place for community members, policymakers, and researchers to identify shared priorities; develop innovative strategies for studying these concerns; and translate information and knowledge into viable community practices.
  • To utilize community-based participatory research approaches in data collection and analysis, including collaboration with community members to understand and prevent youth violence.

Activities
Activities of the Center include:

  • Evaluation of the Roosevelt Village Center, a multicultural youth violence prevention program, at Oakland’s Roosevelt Middle School.
  • Examination of the process and context for incorporating school-based violence prevention programs into culturally diverse, resource poor settings.
  • Development of community mobilization efforts to create a youth violence prevention plan for Oakland’s API and Latino communities.
  • The University-Community Network, an internship program that matches UC Berkeley students with research projects at community-based organizations.
  • Fellowships with the Institute for the Study of Social Change (ISSC),  a research training opportunity for UC Berkeley graduate students.

Center Brochure (PDF)