Description
Community violence harms physical, mental and emotional health. Recognizing violence as a social determinant of health, this session will discuss effective approaches to prevent violence, strategies to promote community resilience and ways to dismantle systems of inequity.
Contributors
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Deborah Prothrow-Stith - Dean, Charles Drew School of Medicine
MODERATOR
Deborah Prothrow-Stith, M.D. is Dean and Professor at the Charles R. Drew University College of Medicine. She advised top-tier healthcare institutions on leadership as a principal at Spencer Stuart and served as the Henry Pickering Walcott Professor of Public Health Practice and Associate Dean for Diversity at Harvard School of Public Health where she created the Division of Public Health Practice and secured over $14 million in grant funding for health programs. While working in inner-city Boston, she broke new ground with efforts to define youth violence as a health problem. She developed The Violence Prevention Curriculum for Adolescents, a forerunner of violence prevention curricula for schools and authored or co-authored Deadly Consequences (HarperCollins 1991); Murder Is No Accident (Jossey Bass Publishers, 2004); Sugar and Spice and No Longer Nice, (Jossey Bass Publishers, 2005); a high school textbook, Health (Pearson 2014); and over 100 articles. In 1987, Governor Michael Dukakis appointed her Commissioner of Public Health for Massachusetts where she led a department with 3,500 employees, 8 hospitals and a budget of $350 million. She and her family lived in Tanzania during her husband’s tenure as U.S. Ambassador. Dr. Prothrow-Stith is a graduate of Spelman College and Harvard Medical School and a diplomate of the American Board of Internal Medicine. In 2003, she was elected to the prestigious National Academy of Medicine. She has received ten honorary doctorates and in 2017, she was named Woman of the Year for the 2nd District by the LA County Board of Supervisors.
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Rachel Davis - Executive Director, Prevention Institute
Rachel Davis is co-founder and executive director of Prevention Institute. The Institute focuses on ensuring that all people experience their full potential for health, safety and wellbeing through thriving, equitable communities. By analyzing and calling out the systematic reproduction of inequities, they support actionable progress through direct partnership with communities, building public health capacity, and advocating for policy/systems change. Davis has played a key role in shaping the Institute’s approach and has provided leadership for their safety, health equity, and mental health and wellbeing portfolios. She is the 2019 recipient of APHA’s Award for Excellence for her transformative leadership in developing innovative tools and frameworks based on scientific knowledge and community practice and experience.
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Anne Marks, MPP - Executive Director, Youth Alive
Anne Marks has led Youth ALIVE!, Oakland’s anchor agency for violence prevention, intervention and healing, since 2010. She is also on the board of the Health Alliance for Violence Intervention (the HAVI). Before Youth ALIVE!, Anne administered the City of Oakland’s prison reentry services and then oversaw the City’s violence prevention strategies. She has also done communications for the U.S. State Department, a presidential campaign, and local initiatives. She received her B.A. from UC Berkeley and a Master of Public Policy from Harvard.
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Reggie Moore
Reggie Moore currently serves as the Injury and Violence Prevention Director for the City of Milwaukee Health Department. Appointed by the Mayor in 2016, he led the expansion of the city’s violence prevention efforts and facilitated the development of the city’s first comprehensive violence prevention plan known as the Blueprint for Peace. Previously, he served as founding Executive Director of the Center for Youth Engagement and national Director of Youth Activism at the Truth Campaign in Washington, DC. Throughout his career, Reggie has fostered multi-sector collaborations for the advancement of health, public safety, and social change. He is a 2020 graduate of the Ambassador for Health Equity Fellowship, a program jointly sponsored by PolicyLink, FSG and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. He also currently serves on the board of the Prevention Institute.
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Giullermo Cespedes - Chief of Violence Prevention, City of Oakland
Guillermo Cespedes is a violence prevention and intervention expert with over 4 decades of experience at the community, municipal, national, and international level. Cespedes worked in Oakland for 19 years in direct services with families experiencing serious challenges of domestic violence, alcoholism, drug addiction and chronic illness. In 1999 Cespedes moved to Los Angeles was appointed Deputy Mayor and Director of the Mayor’s Office of Gang Reduction and Youth Development (GRYD). During his tenure in LA, Cespedes guided the implementation of the city’s comprehensive gang violence reduction strategy, touted with reducing 9 categories of violent gang crimes by nearly 50%. In 2014 Cespedes moved to DC, where he provided technical consultation to the State Department, the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Bureau of International Drugs and Law Enforcement (INL) the United States Agency for international Development (USAID). In 2016 Cespedes moved to Honduras as Deputy Chief of Party for USAID and using that as base of operations, guided the implementation and technical supervision of secondary and tertiary prevention to USAID funded programs in Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, St Lucia, Guyana, St. Kitts and Nevis. In addition, he designed the adaptation and implementation of gang prevention strategies to the prevention of extremist group joining in Tunisia, North Africa. In September 2019 Cespedes returned to Oakland to build the City’s Department of Violence Prevention (DVP), in a unique position as the city’s first.