Gang Alternative, Inc., a community-based organization serving South Florida for over 17 years is proposing Project CAATS (Collective Action for Addressing Trauma and Stress). CAATS is designed to effectively address community violence and collective trauma, using a comprehensive, integrated and multi-sectoral approach to substance use prevention, violence prevention, and trauma-focused community engagement is needed. CAATS is community and data-driven initiative and will be guided by a diverse community coalition with social service providers and youth and adult with lived experiences.
CAATS will target several high crime, high violence and high poverty communities predominantly populated by Black immigrants the tri-county area: Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties. In The harsh reality is that residents in these communities wake up to trauma every day! Trauma from financial instability, poor quality of health care, criminal and violence victimization, and systemic prejudice and racism. Furthermore, based on research that found a strong link between exposure to traumatic events and substance use disorder (SUD) and mental health (MH), it can extrapolated that these communities also have undocumented cases of SUD and undiagnosed MH. CAATS will be guided by the Strategic Prevention Framework and will community violence interventions and trauma-focused approaches to provide services and programming to promote resilience, and advance equity in high-risk communities that have experienced exponential trauma from community violence over the past 2 years.
CAATS will provide direct services to 1425 individual annually with an estimated 9500 as indirect beneficiaries per year. The projected total for lifespan of the project is 5700 unduplicated individuals served directly and 38,000 receiving indirect services through environmental strategies.