—Project Overview
The Senator Charles E. Shannon Community Safety Initiative (Shannon CSI) is a state grant program administered by the Executive Office of Public Safety and Security (EOPSS) to “support regional and multidisciplinary approaches to combat gang violence through coordinated programs for prevention and intervention.” Worcester has received Shannon funding since 2006 due to the youth and gang violence in the city. Worcester is in the process of developing a comprehensive plan to reduce and prevent youth and gang violence.
Shannon CSI is based on the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) Comprehensive Gang Model. Communities that adopt the Comprehensive Gang Model create strategies to address youth and gang violence that integrate the following types of programs:
Social Intervention: Program activities are identified as “intervention-based” for gang-involved youth and young adults and include crisis intervention, case management, trauma counseling for youth and their families, street outreach, and social service referrals.
Opportunity Provision: Program activities that focus on the development of a variety of specific education, training, and employment programs targeted at gang-involved youth and young people at high risk for youth violence and gang involvement.
Suppression: Program activities include law enforcement and criminal justice interventions such as crime analysis, hot-spot patrols, investigations, prosecution, arrest, and probation and parole supervision.
Community Mobilization: Program activities include community education and dialogues and cross-community and multidisciplinary collaboration to improve service coordination.
Organizational Change: Program activities include the development of task forces to address gang problems and the use of data and information to narrow the scope of the problem. In Worcester, our multidisciplinary approach includes a variety of suppression, intervention and prevention activities:
Worcester’s Shannon CSI Initiative brings together the Worcester Police Department, the Boys & Girls Club, Worcester Youth Center, Worcester Community Action Council, and Clark University to address youth and gang violence in the city. Worcester’s Shannon CSI also works with the Safe and Successful Youth Initiative (SSYI) to address the needs of proven-risk men in the community.
• Worcester report (pdf)
–Worcester Youth Violence Prevention and Reduction Strategic Planning Process
• Worcester Youth Violence Needs and Resources Analysis (pdf)
• Brochure
• Calendar of Meetings