Webinar: Hospitals as Leaders in City-Wide Violence Prevention: Strengthening Chicago's Youth

The American Hospital Association's Hospitals Against Violence initiative invites you to an upcoming webinar on how hospitals and health systems can take a lead in convening community stakeholders and citizens to combat escalating violence.

Increasing violence in Chicago has become a critical challenge for city leaders and key institutions. Last year was one of the most violent in the city’s history, ending with the sobering tally of 762 homicides, the most Chicago has seen in two decades. The nation’s third-largest city also reported 1,100 more shooting incidents in 2016 than it did in 2015, according to data released by the Chicago Police Department.

Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago established Strengthening Chicago’s Youth (SCY) in 2012 and has advanced the collaborative as a credible neutral convener of over 5,000 Chicagoans – key city leaders, organizations, and individuals to marshal resources to protect at risk children and families. Lurie Children’s Hospital has established itself as an early leader among “hospitals against violence” and this webinar will share lessons learned from the hospital’s leadership over this multi-year effort.

Learning Objectives:

• Describe the experience of violence in Chicago and other urban settings
• Identify how health care organizations can bring internal expertise and resources on violence to connect with community stakeholders and citizens
• Understand how to leverage shared city-wide resources into prevention strategies, collectively working to end violence and senseless loss of life

Speaker:

Rebecca Levin, MPH, is the strategic director of the Injury Prevention and Research Center at Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago. She directs the Strengthening Chicago’s Youth violence prevention collaborative, which is building capacity among stakeholders in multiple sectors to connect, collaborate and mobilize around a public health approach to violence prevention. She is also the principal investigator on the NIH-funded Community-Academic Collaboration to Prevent Violence in Chicago and leads dissemination efforts for the Illinois Violent Death Reporting System. Before coming to Lurie Children’s in 2011, Ms. Levin worked at the American Academy of Pediatrics for 12 years, overseeing all violence and injury prevention efforts. Ms. Levin received her bachelor’s degree in Integrated Science and Biology from Northwestern University and her master’s degree in Health Policy and Administration from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Moderator:

Bonnie Connors Jellen, MHSA
Director, Section for Maternal and Child Health
Member Relations
American Hospital Association

Presentation slides (PDF)

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Audio recording (MP3)