To build a community-centered and culturally-responsive approach to public safety, agencies and programs must develop and document the effectiveness of their own strategies, whether they affect individual behavior, modify peer group dynamics, improve organizational systems, or advance laws, policies, and practices that mitigate the social-structural factors putting communities at risk. Community organizations and neighborhood leaders cannot accomplish this without the expertise of trained researchers, but they should never simply defer to researchers. Competent researchers must work in partnership with communities and even help communities take a leading role in all efforts. Researchers must not treat communities and neighborhoods as mere data sources and study subjects for an academic research agenda.
The Evidence Generation initiative focuses on the creation and application of credible evidence in the pursuit of safer, healthier, and more equitable communities with a special focus on violence prevention. The initiative is not simply an effort to support the use of evidence-based programs identified in research literature. Community-centered and culturally responsive prevention strategies are often neglected by conventional researchers, largely because primary prevention is more challenging to measure and assess.
Policymakers, service professionals, and their community partners deserve high-quality information about the impact of the full array of programs and policies. In setting priorities, program models that have already been proven effective and efficient are naturally preferred over programs that have yet to be tested by rigorous evaluation. Such preferences, however, should not be sacrosanct. Policymakers and funding sources should be encouraged to think of the evidence base as an ever-changing source of knowledge. The search for credible evidence is an ongoing process. We should never assume that all possible evidence-based practices have already been discovered.
The Evidence Generation initiative at John Jay College focuses on training new generations of applied researchers to grow the evidence base of the future. Much of their work must occur outside of traditional academia. The Evidence Generation initiative is dedicated to training competent researchers and data analysts who will spend their careers working in partnership with public agencies, community-based organizations, and citizen groups. We train researchers in the generation of open-access, readily accessible, and practically-oriented evidence for audiences outside of conventional academia. We train future community-based researchers, not future professors.
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