Amplifying Community-led Violence Prevention as a Counter to Structural Oppression

DOI

Street outreach is a violence prevention model in which organizations hire residents with strong relationships and local expertise to mediate violent conflicts in their communities. We present the results of a two-year co-design engagement with a street outreach organization in which we collaboratively designed, built, and deployed a mobile application (the Street Peace app) to support street outreach workers (SOWs) in the field and in building community. Three different street outreach organizations in Chicago adopted the app for two months. Results suggest that the app supported SOWs' work of building a counter-structure to traditional policing, which is historically oppressive to Black and Brown communities, and practice transformative justice. The SOWs used the app to mediate potentially violent conflicts without police involvement, build community through in-person events, and extend their communities of care through positive stories and narratives that countered harmful stereotypes about Black criminality. By affording SOWs more agency over their communication with each other, the VP app enabled SOWs to connect their strengths and scale their existing counter-structural practices.