In this podcast, Anne Marks, executive director of the Youth
ALIVE! ([ Ссылка ]) hospital-based anti-violence program in Oakland, discusses the history and mission of Youth ALIVE!,
its partnerships with local public health and law enforcement agencies, and how funding under the Minority Youth
Violence Prevention Initiative is increasing the organization’s capacity to serve high-risk minority youth.
The
following is a transcript
RAPHAEL POPE-SUSSMAN:
Hi, this is Raphael Pope-Sussman with the Center for Court Innovation. Today we’re speaking with Anne Marks,
executive director of Youth ALIVE!, and training director for the National Network of Hospital-based Violence Intervention
Programs. Anne, thank you for speaking with us today, and welcome.
ANNE MARKS:
Thanks.
POPE-SUSSMAN: Tell me a bit about Youth Alive.
MARKS: Youth ALIVE! is an almost 25-year-old violence prevention intervention
and youth leadership organization. We are a home-grown organization. We began with a group of students 25 years ago
in East Oakland who were dealing with violence in and around their school, and in their community who wanted to do
something about it, and they developed a series of workshops, which they peer lead to this day, to talk to young
people about gang, gun, family, and dating violence and what people can do to make themselves safer and to make choices
that are healthier.
Starting with those young people is how we began. We incorporated it to support
their vision and their work. They also do a number of community engagement and organizing and advocacy activities,
and from there, we actually had a staff person working in that program, who founded our Caught in the Crossfire program.
Sherman Spears was, as a young man, a victim of violence. He was a gunshot victim and found that that moment
was pivotal in his life, and he wanted to make sure that he was there for people who dealt with that in the future.
Whereas his options at the time were to retaliate or to just die, he wanted to find another way out, and so he found
a way to start working in violence prevention, so he started the Caught in the Crossfire program to help respond
immediately after a young person has experienced trauma, gunshot, stabbing, assault, to help them get on a different
path with a peer who can relate to them to support them.
That program then later incorporated
not just people who had been recently assaulted, but also people who had recently experienced the trauma of incarceration,
so we’ve been working with youth and young adults for some time through that program. That program has actually
been replicated in dozens of communities, and we support those programs through our National Network of Hospital-based
Violence Intervention Programs.
The last thing that we do at Youth ALIVE! is, we work not just
with young people who have been injured, but we work with the families and friends left behind when someone has been
killed by violence. We respond to every single homicide in the city of Oakland to provide the family and friends
with support. We do that work in the memory of Khadafy Washington, who was the murdered son of the founder of that
project, the Khadafy Washington project.
POPE-SUSSMAN: A lot of your
work really focuses on trauma and responding to trauma.
MARKS: Absolutely.
POPE-SUSSMAN: Can you tell me a bit about the Screening Tool for Awareness
and Relief of Trauma, and what the origin of that is?
MARKS: So START,
we call it the Screening Tool for Awareness and Relief of Trauma. It’s really just that. It’s a start for
addressing trauma. The metaphor that we think to look at this is that, trauma is something that hurts, and START
is not a cure. START is aspirin that helps relieve the pain of trauma. It doesn’t make it go away. It’s
not the same thing as engaging in long-term therapy or other support, but it’s something that can help people
feel better and get some relief. How it works is we do a brief screening with someone around different symptoms of
trauma, how it may actually be affecting their life. What their actual experiences of trauma are are actually irrelevant
to how we do this, so we don’t need to know the details of what happened to them to be able to say, “are
these things affecting your life?”
For example, issues with focusing, issues with sleep,
things that can really impact how you live. Then, based on how the respondent answers these questions, we give them
a series of one to three different tools that are brief. We can usually get through this interview in 10-25 minutes,
and give them tools t...
