Violence as a Contagious Disease

I've written about violence in the past and often struggle to define mentoring as a strategy to end violence. I encourage you to view this TED talk featuring Epidemiologist Gary Slutkin, MD, founder of Cure Violence. If you lead a volunteer based tutor/mentor program, encourage your volunteers to view this and to share it with their friends, co-workers, family, etc. As you do look at the way Dr. Sltkin talks about using maps and the three strategies he deploys.

I've posted a number of articles related to this. One of these points to an article I wrote in 2007 titled: Reframing School Dropout as a Public Health Issue

Gary Slitkin is in Chicago and I've had him on my mail list since the mid 1990s. I've met with Tio Hardiman who is with Gary's organization. I've tried to show how mentoring can not only provide specially trained people who intervene to keep kids from dropping out of school, but can also increase the number of people who build personal connections and have empathy and understanding of the problem, and who then are more willing to use their own time, talent and dollars to help support interventions such as Cure Violence, or tutoring/mentoring and other non-school youth engagement and workforce preparation activities.

I'm hosting a Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conference on June 7. I hope some who have looked at Dr. Sltkin's video and understand the importance of intervention and edcation efforts in areas where maps show high concentrations of violence, youth drop outs, gangs, etc., will try to attend so we can build 2013-14 and beyond strategies that get more people involved and make these interventions available in more places.