NATIONAL FORUMS ON YOUTH VIOLENCE PREVENTION TRAINING AND TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE PROJECT

The National Forum on Youth Violence Prevention is a network of communities and federal agencies that work together, share information, and build local capacity to prevent and reduce youth violence. Established at the direction of President Obama in 2010, the Forum brings together people from diverse professions and perspectives to learn from each other about the crisis of youth and gang violence in the United States, and to build comprehensive solutions on the local and national levels.

PROJECT OVERVIEW

DSG has a history of successful conference planning and delivery. We conducted four national conferences under the National Forum and Coordinated TTA projects: the Third Annual Summit on Preventing Youth Violence: Building Towards a Safe and Healthy Tomorrow, held September 26-27, 2013; the Fourth National Summit on Preventing Youth Violence: Reducing Violence/Building Community: From Promise to Practice, held May 11–13, 2015; and the OJJDP Youth Violence Prevention Communities of Practice Fall Convening, held November 17-18, 2015.

Most recently, DSG organized the Fifth National Summit on Preventing Youth Violence: A Hopeful Future: Sustaining Our Work to End Youth Violence, an event co-branded with the White House’s My Brother’s Keeper Initiative, which took place June 27–29, 2016, in Baltimore, Md. This Summit had 774 attendees from OJJDP’s three YVP initiatives; MBK grantees; grantees of Office for Victims of Crime (OVC), Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other federal violence prevention initiatives; federal partners from the U.S. Departments of Education, Housing & Urban Development, Health & Human Services, and Labor, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the U.S. Agency for International Development; TA providers; youths; business and philanthropic organizations; and international representatives.

Unique to the 2016 Summit was the development and dissemination of the National Youth Violence Prevention Update (the Annual Report), and display of three 5-minute videos highlighting the work of each OJJDP YVP initiative. The Update provided a broad overview of each initiative and included unique snippets of success seen in each site. The recognition videos also provided an overview of each initiative from the perspective of federal staff, site directors, outreach workers, youth, law enforcement, governance and community leaders. Both the National YVP Update and initiative videos can be viewed on yvpnews.com.

The National Summit media strategy included LiveStreaming, Summit Reflection Videos, and hashtags on Twitter. The following metrics were recorded:

  • The LiveStream resulted in 1,776 live views and 295 views of the recorded stream for a total of 2,044 views since Day 1 of the Summit on June 27 to June 29. More than 93 percent of the total views were located in the United States, but other countries where views of the LiveStream took place were Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Columbia, Germany, Ghana, Indonesia, Jamaica, Mexico, Pakistan, Philippines, Puerto Rico, Singapore, Trinidad and Tobago, and the United Kingdom.
  • The trending hashtags used during the summit were #NationalForum, #YVPSummit, #OJJDP, and #MBK. The unique hashtags created for the Summit, #NationalForum and #YVPSummit, created impressive analytics from June 25–30. #NationalForum was used in 541 tweets from 180 contributors, reached 804,503 accounts and made 2,213,682 impressions based on followers. #YVPSummit was used in 1,500 tweets from 422 contributors, reached 1,071,301 accounts and made 4,230,290 impressions based on followers.
  • The Summit Reflection videos were brief clips filmed from 19 participants throughout the 3 days of the Summit, to gain a perspective and an overall reaction from attendees.
CONTACT US ABOUT THIS PROJECT

For more information about the Youth Violence National Forum, contact DSG President Marcia Cohen at mcohen@dsgonline.com or 301.951.0056.

PROJECT MATERIALS