BALTIMORE — Friday morning, Mayor Scott announced, starting next month Safe Streets, the city's leading violence intervention program will begin shifting administration of its 10 locations from the city to two local organizations.
10 of Baltimore's Safe Streets sites will now shift day-to-day operations to LifeBridge Health's Center for Hope and Catholic Charities.
Mayor Scott called the move an effort on the city's part to evolve the organization's approach to ensuring safety across the city.
"Having hospital-based partners like LifeBridge manage more of our sites makes sense because its about that connectivity. It's about best practice. They actually are running the most successful site right now that we have up in Catholic Charities.," Scott stated.
Life Bridge Health's Center for Hope will increase their workload taking over admin functions for 6 of safe street's 10 locations.
Adam Rosenberg the executive director says taking a health-centered approach to gun violence is key to making progress in preventing it.
"We know that violence is a public healthcare issue and at life bridge we really see the need to address all forms of health disparities and when we consistently see that violence is one of the main health concerns of our community, we want to be able to address that by making sure people aren’t victims of violent crime," said Rosenburg.
"What we're talking about is now being able to have the resources to be able to connect everybody involved in that system. - Our workers on the streets, our workers in the hospital, the resources and support that people may need to be able to not be a victim of violence [and get them the support that they need with their family, connecting with job opportunities re-entry opportunities," Mayor Scott added.
The move, predicted to be complete by January first, is also expected to create more career opportunities for safe street workers already on the city's safe streets staff..
"What’s great about bringing them into our life bridge health system is that we’re also getting all these people these brave men and women who work at safe streets a career in healthcare and we’re giving them the benefits that are afforded to our LifeBridge health people. They’re going to be Life bridge health employees," said Rosenburg.
