Title: Hands Without Guns

Series: Youth in Action

Author: Shannon Pete

Published: Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention

Subject: juvenile delinquency prevention, school-based programs, gun violence,
crime prevention

pages: 3

bytes: 8,000

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Hands Without Guns
by Shannon Pete

Hands Without Guns is a public health and education campaign of the
Educational Fund to End Handgun Violence (EFEHV), developed in
partnership with 2 PM poesia per musica, a communications firm, to combat
gun violence by providing a forum for positive youth voices. Building on the
model of positive youth development, the campaign engages young people as
violence prevention advocates in their communities.

The media sometimes portray young people as criminals, ignoring the positive
work of many and publicizing the violence of a few. Hands Without Guns
encourages youth involvement in violence prevention by highlighting the hands
that are without guns, thus breaking the cycle of fear that leads youth to carry
guns.

Hands Without Guns has been implemented successfully in Boston, MA;
Chicago, IL; Holland, MI; Norfolk, Richmond, and Virginia Beach, VA; and
Washington, DC. EFEHV is working with the Child Welfare League of
America, the National Education Association, and others to develop additional
Hands Without Guns campaigns.

Through its media outreach, Hands Without Guns seeks to reduce the demand
for guns among youth. Through in-school and afterschool workshops, Hands
Without Guns provides young people with the tools they need to be involved in
all aspects of the media campaign, including the development and production of
antiviolence materials.

Hands Without Guns--DC has developed three outlines to be used as guides
for the workshop process. These workshops, which can be adapted to reach
young people in any community, provide youth a platform from which to
address gun violence and offer them opportunities to take part in positive social
activities. Young people leave the workshops with a better understanding of
how gun violence affects them, their families, and their communities, and with a
strategy for combating such violence.

The initial workshop introduces Hands Without Guns as a program through
which youth can work to create positive change. In the second workshop,
young people review comments from the first workshop and begin to plan and
develop antiviolence projects. In the third workshop, youth review the
discussions from the previous workshops and develop and discuss how to 
implement projects that promote the positive activities of youth within their
communities.

Participants in Hands Without Guns have developed radio and television public
service announcements and newspaper, billboard, and bus advertisements--not
to mention stickers, postcards, buttons, and banners. They have also organized
a march against violence, a toy gun buyback, and a community art festival.

Hands Without Guns also offers a workshop for adults. This workshop focuses
on ways for adults to support young people's efforts to avoid guns and violence
and on ways they can encourage other adults to do the same. Hands Without
Guns believes that it is essential for adults to work hand in hand with youth as
partners to create positive change.

A critical aspect of the workshops is teaching youth and adults how to build
positive relationships with young people. The workshops and media component
establish youth as positive forces in their communities.

In Washington, DC, pre- and postcampaign surveys were administered to
elementary and high school students to evaluate the effect of Hands Without
Guns on youth and gun violence. The surveys found that 38 percent of the 
more than 400 young people who had taken the postcampaign survey could
identify the program. Of those students who could identify the program, 1.3
percent had carried a gun; of those who could not identify the program, 10.3
percent had carried a gun.

Hands Without Guns believes that no one can convey solutions to guns and
violence to America's youth more effectively than their peers. In the words of
one Youth Advisory Board member, "If you could promote peace, violence
wouldn't be around."

For Further Information
Educational Fund to End Handgun Violence
1000 16th Street NW., Suite 603
Washington, DC 20036
202-530-5888, extension 22
202-530-0331 (fax)
handswg@aol.com (e-mail)
Internet: www.handswithoutguns.org

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Shannon Pete is the Youth Coordinator for Hands Without Guns.

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The National Youth Network, founded and managed by the Office of Juvenile
Justice and Delinquency Prevention, consists of diverse youth leaders from
across the Nation who are sponsored by youth-serving organizations. The goal
of the Network is to recognize and build upon the power and importance of
youth leadership by uniting young people and adults, through communication
and action, to enable youth organizations and nonaffiliated youth to have a
positive, formidable impact in our communities and throughout our Nation.

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The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention is a component of
the Office of Justice Programs, which also includes the Bureau of Justice
Assistance, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the National Institute of Justice, and 
the Office for Victims of Crime.