“Being Someone Who Can Buffer the Pains of Life”: Street Outreach Worker Perspectives on Supporting Youths’ Healing from Community Violence

Stemming from disinvestment in minoritized communities, minoritized youth continue to bear an unconscionable burden of gun violence in the United States. Street outreach programs—an evidence-based approach to addressing gun violence—connect workers often with a shared background with impacted youth to mediate conflict and build relationships. This shared experience of collective trauma might provide important insights on impactful approaches to intervening in violence. Our study stems from an 8 year academic-community partnership with an agency serving adolescents impacted by gun violence. We center youth workers’ perceptions of their approaches in supporting adolescents’ healing from collective trauma. Using focus groups, our sample of workers (N = 15) were majority male (86%) and Black (64%). We used a Sort and Sift, Think and Shift analysis. Three themes emerged: (1) Workers’ approach is informed by an understanding of both shared trauma and resilience; (2) Workers see their own healing from shared trauma as part of their work; (3) The key to supporting youth healing is building transformative relationships. Grounded by the themes generated from youth workers’ practice, we introduce The Peace Building Model, which provides a path for anti-oppressive practice with youth that centers healing and combats adultism. Implications for research and clinical social work practice in the context of collective trauma include centering unconditional respect for youth’s lived experience and attending to the youth workers’ own healing.