News
Center kicks off research into curbing youth violence
By Anna Chang and Catherine Hoge, Contributing Writers
source: The Daily Californian
Monday October 2, 2006
The Center on Culture, Immigration, and Youth Violence Prevention is launching its first year of research projects with the help of federal grant money.
A year after the center received grant money from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the UC Berkeley-based coalition will begin research on violence prevention methods that are based in school programs.
The center, which is a collaborative research organization, is operated by the Institute for the Study of Social Change at UC Berkeley, the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, UC San Francisco, and UC Berkeley School of Law.
The organization focuses on examining and researching youth violence in Asian Pacific Islander and Latino populations in the Oakland area.
After being awarded $4.2 million in federal grant money last year to pursue research for the prevention of youth violence, the center is set to begin its first projects using the funds, said Deborah Lustig, the research associate and training coordinator for the center.
The CDC will fund numerous programs through the center, including the research projects of three graduate students and two larger research endeavors, said law professor Rachel Moran, director of the center.
One main project will study the effectiveness of the Roosevelt Village Center, an after-school program at Roosevelt Middle School in Oakland that is centered around promoting multicultural interaction among students, said Thao Le, the lead researcher for the project and an assistant professor of human development and family studies at Colorado State University.
"We're ready to go," Le said. "All we're waiting for is the final okay from the CDC."
The other big project the center is focusing on will examine the transformation of research findings into practical violence-prevention methods, Moran said.
Emily Ozer, a UC Berkeley assistant professor at the School of Public Health, will lead the project.
"She's enlisting youth in schools as partners rather than using them as objects of research," Moran said.
In addition to the research project, the center will be holding a speaker series aimed at bringing together people of diverse backgrounds to discuss youth violence, Lustig said.
The series will kick off on Oct.5 with Ayodele Nzinga, a director at Sister Thea Bowman Memorial Theater in Oakland.
"One of our chief goals is to build an intellectual community at UC Berkeley of people who are interested in youth violence," Lustig said.
