SAN ANTONIO – A national organization known for helping 85 communities across the U.S. develop partnerships with hospitals to reduce violence is helping Stand Up SA establish its own program.
Two San Antonio hospitals will be turned into violence prevention centers this spring.
Stand Up SA is working with the Health Alliance for Violence Intervention, or HAVI, to begin a partnership with University Health and Brooke Army Medical Center, both trauma one centers, to establish a program to help the nonprofit connect with gunshot victims.
Fatimah Loren Dryer, CEO of HAVI, said the program is just one part of a larger ecosystem of programs that work together to combat violence. She says because people who are injured after often involved in crime, an interception by hospital-based intervention programs show a 40% reduction in those victims being shot again at a future date.
“Those people have been again traumatized deeply, are very marginalized from many different kinds of systems. They don’t trust systems, and our work is to reach them and provide the care and support they need to transform their lives,” Dryer explained.
Derek Taylor, program manager of Stand Up SA, hopes the community can do what about 85 other cities in the U.S. are already doing, reaching shooting victims.
“If we reduce shootings in the community, if we turn some people around and make them positive instead of negative persons in the community, that’s success for us,” he said.
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