Organizational Empowerment in Community Mobilization to Address Youth Violence

Community mobilization efforts to address youth violence are often disconnected, uncoordinated, and lacking adequate resources. An organizational empowerment theory for community partnerships provides a useful framework for organizing and evaluating a coalition’s community mobilization efforts and benefits for individual organizations, partnerships, and communities. Based on a qualitative analysis of steering committee interviews and other primary data, the results of a case study suggest that the intraorganizational infrastructure; interorganizational membership practices and networking; and extraorganizational research, training, and organizing activities facilitate the community mobilization efforts of the Youth Violence Prevention Center in Flint, Michigan. The organizational empowerment framework, and its focus on organizational structures and processes, illustrates the importance of recognizing and incorporating the organizational systems and structures that provide the foundation on which a community mobilization effort may build. This framework also highlights how organizational structures and processes are central components of multilevel strategies for organizing and mobilizing community efforts to address youth violence.