The Hill News

When I was working as a doctor in Boston City Hospital’s Emergency Room, I spent way too much of my time treating wounds and injuries from violence. I saw far too many young people who would have been much better served sitting in a high school classroom than sitting bleeding in the ER.

One day I had enough; I wanted to stop stitching people up and sending them out to a world of more violence and figure out how to stop the violence in the first place. Thanks to federal support through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, I began working with communities across the country to implement a different approach to preventing violence: one based on giving young people opportunities and skills, instead of putting them in jail.

But these efforts are in jeopardy.  The Senate Appropriations Committee’s proposed 2012 budget bill zeroed out all funding for the CDC’s youth violence prevention activities. Though the House’s draft version curre! ntly leaves the funding intact, the future of this critical funding is deeply uncertain.
Elimination of this $19.7 million in funding will have a devastating impact on efforts to prevent violence across the country. It will compromise decades of workâ€"including my ownâ€"that are showing real results.

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