The Center was created with a five-year grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in September 2005 as an Academic Research Center of Excellence (ACE). The Johns Hopkins Center for the Prevention of Youth Violence is one of ten Academic Centers of Excellence.
To prevent youth violence and promote positive youth development in Baltimore City by creating academic-community collaborations that extend, evaluate and improve efforts to: 1) monitor and detect fatal and non-fatal youth violence; 2) conduct research aimed at identifying malleable factors related to youth violence and research on interventions that reduce youth violence and associated morbidity and mortality; and 3) create policies and practices that prevent youth violence.
The Center collaborates with a coalition of researchers, faculty, students and staff from Baltimore-based academic centers and partners, state and local officials, collaborators from Baltimore and Maryland-based agencies and organizations, as well as parents, local residents, and youth. The four goals of the Center are: 1) administrative and infrastructure development; 2) improvement of surveillance of youth violence and related risk and protective factors; 3) promotion of interdisciplinary community-based participatory research (CBPR) strategies; and 4) the fostering of collaboration and the improvement of practice. As outlined in our logic model, the Center’s goals are consistent with those of the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (NCIPC), including: 1) supporting research aimed at generating and disseminating more effective practices for reducing injury-related death and disability; 2) implementing better procedures for monitoring and detecting fatal and non-fatal injuries; and 3) increasing the capacity of injury prevention and control programs to prevent injuries and violence through collaborations, education and training. | 
