Marla Davis, Director, Philadelphia CeaseFire

>> Hi, I'm Marla Davis-Bellamy and I'm the Director of the Philadelphia CeaseFire program as well as the Director of Civic Engagement for the Center for Bioethics, Urban Health and Policy at the Katz School of Medicine at Temple University. CeaseFire is a public health violence intervention program. It's actually based on Cure Violence which is Chicago national, international program. And what we're doing is reducing violence particularly homicides and shootings in a particular target area using a public health approach. We use data. We believe that violence spreads like a disease from person to person. And what we're doing is identifying high risk young people particularly in North Philadelphia who are engaged in high risk activity. What we're doing is trying to help them change their behavior by identifying job opportunities, education opportunities for them. Give them some alternatives to their current lifestyle. So what we're trying to do is kind of identify young people maybe on the streets. They may be on the corners. They may be in schools. They may in bars. Different places and so what we do is we utilize what we call credible messengers. We hire people from that particular community who often times are very familiar with the young people in the area. And so we go out. We talk to them. We talk to them one on one. We talk to them in groups. And really try to identify what seems to be some of their challenges in term of life challenges. Often times, many of them have grown up in families, communities where violence is all they know. So we kind of look at violence as a learned behavior. And what we try to do is interrupt that behavior by identifying credible messenger, a mentor to work that young person. They make five home visits, three telephone calls a week with the idea of staying in their ear about changing their lifestyle.