UMass Boston

BCVI is an interdisciplinary academic, practitioner, student, and youth focused initiative seeking an understanding of violence in the greater Boston area by working collaboratively to identify, plan and implement effective strategies to address the culture of violence. BCVI is a multi-sector approach to understanding violence in our communities, supporting mutual efforts, facilitating new strategies, and understanding the culture of violence that envelopes the community, through individual and collective action and understanding.

BCVI hosts multiagency multi-sector discussion meeting, creates and hosts ongoing roundtable discussions on the topic of violence, offers educational forums on the evolving understanding of the culture of violence, mentors graduate students in their scholarship, engages faculty across disciplines, and anticipates developing interdisciplinary courses on the culture of violence to be offered both internally as a part of the university curriculum and externally to the community.

BCVI meetings are also the locus for planning efforts for directly addressing forms of community violence as it is identified by participants.  Participants engage in identifying and prioritizing goals, establishing objectives to meet the goals, conceptualizing and developing programming and identifying resources to support ongoing BCVI strategies in the communities with which it is engaged.