Peace Education Program’s Pivot to Peace is a program for survivors of stabbings and gunshot injuries, as well as those living at a high risk of violence. Pivot to Peace is an opportunity to be supported post-injury, develop plans to stay safe and address the factors that may have put individuals at risk for violence.
Who is eligible to participate?
• Jefferson County residents injured by gunshot or stabbing.
• Anyone living with a high risk of violence.
96% Success Rate
Since 2016, Pivot to Peace caseworkers have had a 96% success rate in preventing retaliation and re-injury with survivors of gunshots and stabbings.
REAL (Realize and Elevate Your Ability to Live)
This is an opportunity for the support team and the participants to come together in fellowship and have open discussions about the challenges they are facing and to receive guidance on the road to healing.
How Pivot to Peace Works
It’s a referral system. Hospital emergency departments, trauma departments, and community health workers or other medical staff can refer potential participants to Pivot to Peace. Referrals from other medical entities, doctors, schools and families are also accepted. An individual is also able to self-identify.
Once a referral is made, the Pivot project manager will contact participants for follow up and will assign a case manager upon enrollment.
What Pivot Does
We offer guidance and help make connections. Once connected with a case manager, participants will receive wraparound case management services, including counseling and mentoring for the participant and their families, and receive referrals for services including job training, employment, parenting training, counseling (personal and family), GED, and other educational services and support as identified or needed.
Participants, as well as their family members and friends, are also invited to participate in 20 hours of training in nonviolent conflict resolution offered by the Peace Education Program.
Did You Know?
• Other programs in the country have found that with intervention it is possible to positively affect the participant’s lives. The Department of Justice has been supportive, too. In 2012, it recommended hospitals become more involved in violence prevention through counseling patients directly or connecting them with education, gang diversion programs, substance abuse treatment and social services.
• About 30 hospitals across the country — from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia to the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York — have developed similar initiatives. Research shows that, if someone comes into a hospital suffering from a gunshot or stab wound and then, after leaving the hospital returns to the same environment, they are more likely to reappear in the emergency department with escalated injuries.
• Trends and anecdotal evidence suggest people at higher risk for violent injury are likely to face issues such as domestic violence, mental illness, or substance abuse. They also often deal with other stress factors like poverty or inadequate housing.
• The University of California San Francisco found that people who had come to the hospital with a gunshot or stab wound and then participated in the intervention program were far less likely to get injured again after leaving. The number of patients returning with another violent injury dropped from 16 percent to 4.5 percent. The University of Maryland‘s statistics are similarly encouraging. Research has found that victims of violent injury who participated in the program were 83 percent less likely to return because of another violent event when compared with those who did not participate
• The Hospital Violence Intervention Program (HVIP) has been in existence since 1990. The model originated in Oakland, Calif, with Youth Alive and in Milwaukee, Wis. with Project Ujima, a program at the Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin.
Funding for Pivot to Peace is provided by Louisville Metro Government Office
for Safe and Healthy Neighborhoods and other partners.
For more information about Pivot to Peace, contact:
Deborah Barnes-Byers at 502.589.6510
Email: deborah@peaceeducationprogram.org