A healing-centered approach to preventing urban gun violence: The Advance Peace Model

Urban gun violence is the result of and contributes to trauma for both individuals and communities. In the US, African American males between 15 and 34 years old bear the greatest mortality burden from gun violence. Community-based approaches that use credible, street-level outreach workers to interrupt conflicts, mentor the small number of offenders in each community, and offer them alternatives to violent conflict resolution, have demonstrated success in reducing firearm homicides. Yet, few of these approaches explicitly aim to also address the traumas of structural violence that contribute to gun crime, including dehumanizing policing, extreme poverty, and institutional racism. This commentary describes a program called Advance Peace that aims to explicitly use a healing-centered approach to address the traumas associated with violence as a means to reduce gun crime in urban communities. We describe the trauma-informed, healing-centered approach used by Advance Peace, the components of its intensive outreach strategy called the Peacemaker Fellowship, and some impacts the program is having on trauma and healing. The evidence comes from observations, interviews, and the voices of Advance Peace participants and staff. We suggest that exploring the inner workings of the Advance Peace model is critical for identifying ways to support trauma-informed healing-centered approaches in Black and brown communities that have been ravaged by racism, incarceration, and heavy-handed state violence.