Artwork stating 'Education Destroys Barriers', 'We Demand Treatment', and 'I Need A Chance'

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  • Berke attributes Chattanooga's drop in gang violence to Violence Reduction Initiative

    Seven years after the creation of Chattanooga's Violence Reduction Initiative, gang violence in the city is down by two-thirds even while other types of gun violence have increased. The program uses an approach called focused deterrence to target people suspected of being at highest risk of committing violence, offering them social services if they stop the violence. It got off to a slow start and has encountered numerous obstacles. But, while no formal evaluation proves that the initiative caused gang violence to decline, city officials believe that the correlation is no coincidence.

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  • Access to medical care is difficult for the rural uninsured. This clinic comes to them.

    The St. Mary’s Legacy Clinic is a mobile health clinic bringing care to uninsured, rural residents in Tennessee. The initiative has reached nearly 250 people since it started, providing care to six different towns once per month. With the costs of health care without insurance being enough to turn people away from seeking it, this clinic provides medical evaluations, medicine, and lab work – all with the hope of rebuilding trust between communities and the healthcare system.

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  • How church volunteers are preparing for the next natural disaster

    Rather than wait for disaster to strike, a network of churches across the Southern United States brings volunteers together to pack buckets with the essentials to prepare for families whose homes have been damaged by tornadoes or hurricanes. Though often the supplies run thin in the aftermath of a storm like Hurricane Florence, the church communities manage to get buckets out to those in need much quicker than other networks, who struggle to gather supplies after the storm has hit.

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  • Overcoming the stigma of divorce at a church

    For many experiencing divorce, a safe place to deal with frustrations and stigma is important. In Chattanooga, Tennessee, religious institutions are stepping in to provide support groups and classes like DivorceCare, which can focus on children, single parenting education, and grief sharing.

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  • How Chattanooga churches are making changes to go green

    Churches in Chattanooga, TN are taking steps to make their spaces more environmentally -friendly and -conscious. Places like St. Paul’s Episcopal Church and Grace Episcopal Church are taking on initiatives like motion-detected lighting systems, upgrading faucets to curb usage, and creating raised beds for community gardening. While they’ve made great strides, they’ve also reckoned with the challenge of creating making such unique spaces, with its high ceilings and stained-glass windows, more green.

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  • Cost of the Crossfire: Forum discusses solutions to gun violence in Chattanooga

    Chattanooga’s Times Free Press convened community leaders from across the city to discuss gun violence. Beyond exploring the many forces causing gun violence, like toxic masculinity and social media, the forum provided a platform for participants to voice what needs to happen to explore what’s possible. Citing interventions such as decreasing mental illness stigma and teaching conflict resolution at a young age as possibilities, underpinning each idea was the need for people to be active in their communities.

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  • Hope for the Future

    In Tennessee, reducing gun violence means intercepting it at the earliest level possible. By creating prevention programs for the state’s young population, they’re able to not only decrease rates of violence, but decrease prison populations and thus state costs as well. Programs like Youth ChalleNGe and various Family and Development Centers work with at-risk youth to provide them with the guidance, support, and empowerment they need.

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  • A 360 Approach

    Across the United States, more and more cities are treating gun violence like a public health issue – seeking to take preventative, rather than reactionary, measures. Programs like Savannah’s Youth Intercept and Philadelphia’s Healing Hurt People, connect victims of violence with intervention services, like counseling, housing security, education services, and substance abuse treatments. The approach, while widely backed by data and research and being deployed in many cities, has run into issues like funding government support.

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  • 'Nobody was born bad'

    Chattanooga’s Violence Reduction Initiatives used a focused deterrence strategy to reduce crime. The initiative has led to a decrease in gang-involved homicides and shootings, working with individuals on probation to provide them with the social services they need to stop them from re-entering a life of crime. A core part of this method is to show communities that they’re not forgotten and that they’re cared for, and yet securing funding and consistent support for such programming has been challenging.

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  • Cautiously Optimistic

    Small and large cities around the United States have their own ways of deterring gun violence, from heavier police presences, to community engagement efforts, to public health approaches. An ongoing and similar challenge for these cities is pinpointing where the most effective change is coming from. In cities like Chattanooga, Savannah, and Philadelphia, each one has seen some impact from their work, but without ongoing evaluations, proving and thus sustaining the successful programming is challenging.

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