G-VITAL

Our Mission

The G-VITAL Institute at UC Berkeley, in partnership with Advance Peace and Youth Alive, is dedicated to fostering a collaborative environment that empowers communities through innovative action research and professional development initiatives. Our mission is to equip frontline workers, educators, and social service providers with the knowledge and skills necessary to effectively interrupt gun violence and promote healing.

Through fostering student involvement and establishing strong connections among essential community partners, we seek to empower urban neighborhoods and create sustainable change and resilience. G-VITAL will serve as a catalyst for helping generate and share transformative knowledge and practices so that community violence intervention can support a safer and more equitable future for everyone.

Our Focus Areas

Action-Research about CVI

We are partnering with practitioners, communities, cities and others to get inside the work of CVI, understand what works, the challenges practitioners face and how to integrate these insights into policy and programs. We center the lived experience and knowledge not only of CVI leaders and practitioners, but also that of those at the center of urban gun violence and those living in communities impacted by gun violence. We use research to understand the traumas behind urban gun violence, to value and humanize those at the center of gun violence and to support healing.

Current projects include collaborative evaluations of the Advance Peace intervention, analyses of the Peacemaker Fellowship’s impact on individual and community outcomes, and profiling women street outreach workers.

Training & Leadership Development

We will certify violence interrupters through an integrated, hands-on training program spanning approximately a year. This comprehensive program will encompass fieldwork and in-class training sessions with experts. Our goal is to equip school teachers and social service providers with the necessary skills and knowledge to effectively support community violence intervention efforts and the populations they serve.

In addition to our training program, we currently offer a graduate-level course at UC Berkeley titled “Urban Gun Violence Prevention: A Public Health Approach.” This course provides students with a comprehensive understanding of the causes and consequences of gun violence, as well as practical strategies for preventing it.

We collaborate with existing Cal programs, such as the Berkeley Underground Scholars and classes we offer within prisons, including San Quentin. These partnerships enable us to develop the next generation of CVI leaders and outreach workers who can effectively address the root causes of gun violence and provide support to communities in need.

Network Building

We support and sponsor regional, national, and global networks of CVI practitioners. We understand that local practitioners and even those enrolled in CVI programs can feel isolated and rarely get chances to travel, participate in, and even lead their own conferences and workshops. We are helping to bring together outreach workers and program participants in CVI from communities around the world to learn from each other, strategize, heal together and create family.

University-Community Partnerships

We aim to expand CVI into curriculum across the UC system and universities around the world. In order to do that, we are building a global network of action researchers, scholars and students interested in and working to lift-up CVI practice and research. Our goal is to create a pipeline of scholars and future leaders in public safety, drawing from public health, urban policy, and related fields.