Innovation forums: Big ideas to reverse trajectory of community violence

Community violence impacts health and well-being, disrupting and harming lives and neighborhoods. Community violence is an extremely complex problem which has eluded solution.

Because big ideas to mitigate violence and make communities safer and healthier are urgently needed, a new study by Regenstrief Institute and the Indiana University School of Medicine researchers presents the use of innovation forums, held virtually with participants from the community, health care and local government to highlight priorities, recommend strategies and identify innovative solutions to counter community violence. In the study, 10 groups of innovation forum participants generated 162 potential solutions to community violence.

"A qualitative analysis of innovation forums for community violence prevention: the Big Idea" is published in the journal Discover Public Health.

Among the recurring themes were:

• limiting gun access.
• changing policies to decrease school expulsions of children who become involved in the criminal justice system to provide alternate paths for them that include education.
• limiting promotion of risk factors such as alcohol use.
• increasing the capacity of federally qualified (also known as safety net) health centers.
• altering policies related to affordable housing.
• increasing employment, vocational skills and trade programs.

An overarching big idea that emerged from these innovation forums focused on changing the narrative about community violence by:

• creating media campaigns to destigmatize victims of violence.
• exploring avenues to extinguish misconceptions about violence being produced by individuals with mental illness.
• making policy evidence based.

The innovation forum model was developed by researchers from Regenstrief Institute and the IU School of Medicine to focus on solution generation by those impacted by a perplexing problem. While this study's innovation forums focused on violence in Indianapolis, a city that is larger than San Francisco, Seattle, Denver, Boston or Detroit, the methodology could be utilized by any community to address violence, says study senior author Malaz Boustani, M.D., MPH.

He notes that it could also be employed to address other problems. The first application of the innovation forum concept was by Dr. Boustani, who is an aging researcher, geriatrician and agile scientist, to build the Indianapolis Discovery Network for Dementia to improve dementia care.

"The health and the safety of the community is the number one priority," he said. "In our new study we found that using innovation forums and actually listening to the community and getting to know the local context of violence by being involved with the people who are living the problems and seeking their help and their solutions in a diversified voice, is crucial for generating solutions that might make the future of Indianapolis much brighter.

"This project was called the Big Idea because big problems require big solutions. We learned there was a sense that efforts have been siloed and that if there was collaboration to bring efforts to the community, they would be more effective. Utilizing innovation forums, which focus solely on solution generation, provided multiple intertwined lines to create big ideas."

Further dissemination of information on countering and preventing community violence, acquired during the process, is planned.

"As a trauma surgeon, I see the results of community violence all the time. In addition to physically caring for these patients, I try to connect them to resources that can help them change their lives, recover and avoid this from happening again, but that's not enough" said study first author Damaris Ortiz, M.D., of the IU School of Medicine and the medical director of Prescription for Hope, a program for patients recovering from a violence-related injury such as a gunshot, stabbing or assault being treated at Eskenazi Health, which has a number of sites that are federally qualified health centers.

"In our study the majority of solutions proposed were not novel. But they were the ones that the innovation forum participants who were living the problem in different spaces across the community, health care and government want as solutions—intensive service opportunities and the creation of protective environments."