State Targeted Violence Prevention

The following resource aims to serve as a guide for U.S. state governments as they seek to implement comprehensive targeted violence prevention (TVP) programming. It is not aimed to be prescriptive, but rather provide menus of options for what comprehensive TVP programming might look like at a state level.

This resource lays out three specific categories of activities for state-level TVP implementation. The first (Preparation) and last (Monitoring) are "back-end" activities to help state governments lay the groundwork for effective programming and sustain those efforts in perpetuity. The middle category (Prevention) follows the public health model of violence prevention and incorporates four levels of prevention—Primordial, Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary—that address community and individual susceptibility to targeted violence.

Guided by the broad mission statement each activity category (i.e. Preparation, Prevention, Monitoring) has been organized as a logic model, delineating individual goals to accomplish the mission, and corresponding objectives, tasks, outputs, and desired outcomes for each goal. For each output and outcome, or key performance indicators (KPIs), we propose measures of success and corresponding methods/scales to calculate those measures. We also suggest impact indicators to gauge the extent of achieving the overall mission.

Finally, appendices lay out definitions of key terms, potential TVP stakeholders, references for targeted violence risk factors, scales for use in conducting measurements, and a references to materials used to develop this resource.