Early in medical school, Alison Culyba worked at a Philadelphia shelter and service provider for young adults with nowhere, or no reliable place, to live. She was struck by the resilience they displayed in the face of violence: “I knew that I wanted to pursue a career focused on violence prevention through this lens of strength and resilience, focusing on all of the talents, gifts and assets that young people bring to the table.”

Now an MD, PhD, MPH assistant professor of pediatrics, public health, and clinical and translational science at the University of Pittsburgh, Culyba works with community members and partner organizations to support Pittsburgh’s young people amid rising rates of youth violence.  

In her research, she has mapped the support networks of youth who’ve experienced violence. She’s found that strong relationships with family members, teachers, mentors and other adults help teens navigate the challenging situations they encounter. “It’s one of these key cross-cutting factors that protects against almost everything you can imagine in terms of adolescent health, including exposure to violence,” she says.

Culyba and her partners are putting those findings into action. This year, they launched a pilot of an intervention program called Strengthening Connections for Change (SCC), supported by a Career Development Award from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

The program not only introduces young people to strategies and resources available to them, it also helps them build a cache of reliable relationships that they can tap into amid the burden of violence around them. The pilot ran in the East Liberty and Knoxville neighborhoods, with two 12-week sessions in each.

Over the course of the program, community facilitators guided the teenagers’ participation. “Some of the things that they’ve seen and experienced, we’ve seen and experienced,” says April Jones. She’s an SCC facilitator in East Liberty, where the program partners with the Family and Friends Initiative and the UPMC Center for Engagement and Inclusion to host sessions at the UPMC Health Plan Neighborhood Center.

Michelle Lewis, another East Liberty facilitator, finds that young people usually come in without a strong sense of who they can turn to in times of trouble. However, “when they start writing it down, seeing it on paper, they start to realize the connections,” she says. Of course, the results are different for everyone.

“There isn’t one ‘right way’ for networks to look,” Culyba says. What matters, she says, is a diversity of types of connections.

During sessions, participants also role-play challenging scenarios and hash out strategies to handle them. Midway through the program, trusted adults the teens have identified join the sessions. “Supporting the supporters,” Culyba says, is key to success. Some teens don’t have anyone like this in their lives—so SCC invites mentors from churches and community groups to fill the need.

Culyba and her team will now dig into surveys to find how the program might affect participant violence perpetration and victimization, attitudes toward violence, coping mechanisms and more.

But Lewis says she saw the benefits firsthand, as teens opened up as the program went on. She recalls a participant and a mentor who’d met through the program cracking up in the corner as they got to know each other. “They were laughing so loud, I wanted to be over there!” she says. Later, the young man shared how much more confident he felt now that he had someone to turn to.

The pilot culminated with a celebration, where students “talked about their journeys, about their neighborhoods, about their visions for the future,” Culyba says. “It was incredibly inspiring to see their personal development.” Many spoke about the importance of churches and youth groups. For those interested, Culyba and her collaborators offer to connect the youth with other local initiatives to keep them moving forward in their journeys.

Stronger bonds between the teens and their communities benefit everyone, Lewis says. The isolation brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, she has found, weakened many of the ties teens previously had; rebuilding them is urgent. “If we don’t have youth invested positively in our communities,” she says, “we don’t have a future.”

Read more from the Fall 2023 issue.