News Release

Community Groups Meet At UCSF/Mount Zion September 24 For Second National Video Conference On Violence Prevention

Meeting Announcement

University of California - San Francisco

On Thursday, September 24, UCSF/Mount Zion Medical Center will host the second of six nationwide video teleconferences aimed to prevent violence that damages the lives of children and their families. Educators, community leaders, doctors, parents, teens and police from San Francisco and the Bay Area will join in the teleconference as a prelude to a discussion of a community response to violence in the media. UCSF/Mount Zion Medical Center is part of UCSF Stanford Health Care.

Media Are Invited To Cover The Event:

Location: UCSF/Mount Zion, 1600 Divisadero St., Herbst Hall, 2nd floor, San Francisco

Times:

    8:45 am to 9:30 am - Registration and Welcome
    9:30 to 12:30 pm - Live national satellite teleconference
    1:30 pm to 3:30 pm - Panel discussion: "Is Media Imitating Life or is Life Imitating the Media"

Broadcast media may be able to downlink the teleconference from a satellite feed. For details call UCSF News Services

The morning teleconference will be a live, interactive training program linking 60 sites nationwide. Led by representatives of the national group Partnerships for Preventing Violence, participants will learn techniques to build community coalitions to address violence. More than 2,000 people at 40 sites joined the first Partnerships for Preventing Violence training session, held May 13, 1998. During the afternoon discussion session at UCSF Mt. Zion, local participants will discuss how parents, teachers, youth and community organizations can act together to address the problem of violence in the media. Members of the audience will be invited to talk with a panel of discussants, to include parents, students, and representatives of the San Francisco schools and the Department of Public Health.

Madeline Levine, PhD, a clinical psychologist in private practice in Marin County, will be one of the discussants. She is the author of Viewing Violence, a book describing how violence affects the development of children and adolescents. Another discussant will be Tracy Salkowitz, executive director of the American Jewish Congress, Jack Berman Advocacy Center, a group dedicated to reducing firearm-related violence.

UCSF/Mount Zion is hosting the teleconference as part of its long-standing collaboration on violence prevention with groups in San Francisco and particularly in the hospital's Western Addition neighborhood.

The UCSF/Mount Zion Violence Prevention Project (MZVPP) was founded in 1995 by pediatricians and pediatric social workers. "We decided to work intensively with families who are attempting to deal with violence in their lives, as a way of preventing injuries, trauma and the devastating emotional effects of being witnesses to domestic and community violence," said pediatric social worker Joanne Ruby, interim director of the program.

"The physical, psychological and financial costs of violence for our individual patients and society as a whole are staggering," said Margaret McNamara, MD, chief of Pediatrics for UCSF/Mount Zion and one of the founders of the violence prevention program. "Just as we promote the use of child car seats or seat belts and bicycle helmets, many physicians see violence as a public health problem of epidemic proportion which would be best addressed through prevention rather than reacting after the fact."

The program has several components. PATHWAYS (People Allied to Help Western Addition Youth Succeed) is a family support program which provides crisis intervention and therapy for families whose children have been affected by violence. A parent education series emphasizes building self-esteem in children and positive discipline techniques with a focus on alternatives to physical punishment.

MZVPP also works in partnership with the Western Addition Health and Wellness Collaborative, which concentrates on the health and well-being of children in local schools, and with the Western Addition Crime Abatement Committee. "Violence is pervasive in society today. It takes a community-wide strategy to respond," Ruby said.

That is why the UCSF/Mount Zion Violence Prevention Project has linked up with Partnerships for Preventing Violence, a coalition of the Harvard School of Public Health, the Berkeley-based Prevention Institute, and the Education Development Center in Boston. The Sept. 24 teleconference, transmitted by satellite by the Massachusetts Corporation for Educational Telecommunications, is the second of six training sessions planned over the next three years to help local communities develop violence prevention programs.

The teleconference is sponsored by the US Department of Education, Safe and Drug Free Schools Program; US Department of Health and Human Services, including the Maternal and Child Health Bureau, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Center for Injury Prevention and Indian Health Services; and the US Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

Local co-sponsors of the conference include: MZVPP, Jones Memorial United Methodist Church, the Ben Franklin Middle School Healthy Start Initiative, Rosa Parks Elementary School, Jack Berman Advocacy Center, the American Jewish Congress, Culture on the Corner, Operation Contact/Safety Network, the Center for African American Arts and Culture, the San Francisco Sheriff's Department Resolve to Stop the Violence Program, the San Francisco Department of Public Health Violence Prevention Network, the Hospital Council, Bay Area Division, Big Brothers/Big Sisters of San Francisco and the Peninsula, and Blue Cross Medi-Cal Programs.

UCSF/Mount Zion's violence prevention program is primarily supported by Mount Zion Health Systems and by the United Way, with grants from other local funders.

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Reporter's Note: For more information about the teleconference or about violence prevention at UCSF and UCSF/Mount Zion, contact Abby Sinnott at (415) 885-7277 or Janet Basu at (415) 476-2557.

For national statistics about violence and more information about the national Partnership for Preventing Violence, see the Violence Prevention Program web site at http://www.mcet.edu/partnerships/

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