As program manager for the Center for Violence Prevention (CVP) at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Michelle Abel manages all core administrative, financial, and strategic operations of the center in collaboration with a leadership team that includes Co-Directors Dr. Joel Fein and Dr. Stephen Leff. Her work furthers the mission of CVP to help reduce juvenile violence in the Philadelphia community.
Abel, who graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a degree in Communication Arts, discovered her passion for public health and nonprofit work after a diverse career that began in public relations. Her time at the Allstate Foundation, in which she worked on a teen distracted driving campaign, fueled her desire to make a meaningful impact, eventually leading her to pursue a master’s degree in public health from Johns Hopkins University. After gaining experience working in nonprofit sectors like the Food Trust, Abel is now on the board of CVP, where she channels her skills into preventing youth violence and empowering communities.
Can you tell me your name and about your role at the Center for Violence Prevention? What are your main responsibilities?
I am the Program Manager for the Center for Violence Prevention. In my role, my specific duties are to help oversee the administrative, financial, strategic, and communication operations of CVP. I’m part of the leadership team for the Center for Violence Prevention, which also includes our Co-Directors, Dr. Joel Fein and Dr. Steve Leff, along with our Associate Director of Communications, Lindsay Mitros, and our Business and Administrative Director, Ronnie Kessler. Those are the people I work with most closely in my day-to-day duties.
What inspired you to work in this field? Could you share some of your background and how it led you to this position?
To start off, my undergraduate degree is a BA in Communication Arts from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. While I enjoyed the coursework, I honestly wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my degree when I graduated. After graduating, I tried different things, including substitute teaching, and I completed a year-long paid internship at Weber Shandwick, a communications and public relations agency. It was through my work at Weber Shandwick—because you work with different clients—that I became involved with the Allstate Foundation, which was focused on reducing distracted driving among teens. Some of my other clients were large corporations selling products, but it was through my work on that campaign that I decided to pursue a career in the nonprofit sector and found a passion for helping youth. I left Weber Shandwick because I enjoyed the feeling of doing something meaningful, which led me to seek work in the nonprofit sector. I also worked for Big Brothers Big Sisters of the Greater Twin Cities in Minnesota in a PR role for a couple of years. While I really enjoyed my time there, I always knew I wanted to return to school, but I was unsure of what to study and didn’t want to pursue a degree just for the sake of it. After much thought and reflection on my work experiences, I decided to return to school to earn a master’s degree in public health. After graduating, I worked at the Food Trust in Philadelphia, a local nonprofit focusing on food access, affordability, and nutrition education. I spent over seven years at the Food Trust and really enjoyed my time there, but towards the end, I was looking for a new challenge. I saw a position open at CHOP, and it seemed like a great fit. While I didn’t have direct experience in violence prevention, many of my skills translated well to the role, and I understood the critical need for violence prevention work. I was eager to learn more and contribute to this field, which led me to my current role.
Can you provide an overview of the Center for Violence Prevention? What are the main initiatives you focus on?
Just right off the bat, I can tell you that the mission of our center is to reduce both the exposure to and the impact of violence among children, teens, and families. To do that, we conduct community-focused research and design innovative, evidence-based programs that are implemented, disseminated, and sustained across clinical, school, and neighborhood settings. In our work, we ensure that our approach is trauma-informed and rooted in racial equity and social justice. Within our center, we have six pillars. These pillars represent areas of focus, which include community violence and trauma support, aggression and bullying prevention, intimate partner violence prevention, suicide prevention, gun safety, and professional development and training. The professional development pillar is listed at the top. We have leaders for each of these pillars, and teams work within each pillar. Within each pillar, there may be just one program, while others may have multiple programs. We strive to honor the complexity of violence by using a comprehensive public health framework that addresses the issue from multiple levels and at multiple touchpoints, focusing on various types of violence and working with programs that impact youth of all ages. Another aspect that makes us stand out is that while our center conducts violence prevention programming, we also conduct research. Our research is embedded into our programs, so we are constantly evaluating them to ensure they are effective, not causing harm, and improving wherever possible. This integration of research and programming is a crucial aspect of what we do at our center.
How does your team work with the broader Philadelphia community to address juvenile violence? What partnerships, if any, are most essential?
I would just say, in general, partnerships are essential to our center’s work. We have built strong relationships with many different community agencies and local organizations. An example would be the Philadelphia School District. We have folks within our aggression and bullying prevention pillar who have been working with the school district for more than 20 years now to really help improve classroom climate by designing, implementing, and evaluating programs that decrease aggression and promote social-emotional skills and healthy student-teacher relationships. Another great example is our intimate partner violence prevention work, where we partner with Lutheran SePlement House and Laurel House to address intimate partner violence and teen dating violence. And, of course, we have many other partners as well throughout all of the work that we’re doing—those are just, you know, highlighting a couple. And then, in terms of the research aspect, our community research partnerships help to ensure that our studies are co-created with community expertise, that the questions we ask are meaningful and relevant, and that the answers and solutions we develop can be readily implemented and disseminated. We also try to integrate community-based participatory research, abbreviated CBPR—you may see that we try to implement those methods as much as possible to evaluate everything we’re doing because that allows us to combine evidence-based strategies with the voice and feedback of those most impacted by our programs. By doing that, we know that our programs represent best practices and are uniquely designed to meet the needs of youth and families. In addition to partnering with organizations on programs and research, our staff also serve on many different committees and participate in various community workgroups as well.
Can you share some of the Center’s most significant successes in preventing juvenile violence?
CVP has grown a lot over the past 11 years. We really started with four focus programs and have now expanded to what we call our six pillars, which, as you know, encompass even more programs. In addition, today, we have formal relationships with faculty across the entire CHOP enterprise, representing 18 different divisions or departments within CHOP. Ultimately, we’re able to touch the lives of many more youth and families today than we were when we first started. There have also been successes within our individual program teams. We have a lot of different examples; a couple that I can mention are, for instance, we serve more than 1,000 students per year in our ongoing school-based aggression and bullying prevention program, and have seen improved outcomes for more than 70% of those students. These outcomes include things like decreased aggression, improved problem-solving, and increased empathy. Since 2013, we have also served more than 627 youth and their families through our intensive Violence Intervention Program for violently assaulted youth, resolving nearly 90% of client and family-identified needs through that program.
What challenges does the program face in reducing violence among youth? Are there any obstacles that you find particularly difficult to overcome?
This work is not easy, and there’s not one thing that’s going to, you know, solve the issue of violence in our communities. We are certainly proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish over the past 11 years, but we also realize that our work is far from complete. I will say that we are incredibly fortunate to have institutional support from CHOP to help conduct our research and programs. In addition, our program teams are always working hard to earn external grant funding. But as you can imagine, a lot of our work is very personnel-heavy, and it takes a lot of time and resources to do what we do. With more funding, we could certainly scale and disseminate our evidence-based programs at a local, regional, and national level, which would help us positively impact more youth and families. Additional funding would hopefully help us recruit current and future national leaders in violence prevention research and continue to help us create innovative, cutting-edge approaches to addressing violence prevention.
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