Dr. Robert Gore, an emergency room doctor in Brooklyn, is on a mission to save the lives of young people before they are brought to him on a stretcher.
Gore, who was raised in Brooklyn and works in the ER at Kings County Hospital and SUNY Downstate Medical Center, sees “violence” as an endemic public health issue. He tells 1010 WINS Anchor Larry Mullins: “We see people who are coming in as survivors and victims of intentional trauma and intentional violence that is purely the cost of certain types of conflict that hasn’t been resolved, but also people not understanding how to communicate in an effective manner to resolve issues that don’t have a violent nature as a solution.”
Wanting to help young people find alternative ways to resolve their issues, he created an organization called Kings Against Violence Initiative (KAVI), a prevention and intervention program. Its mission states that “violence not only takes on many different forms, but our public health perspective recognizes many different factors contribute to violence, including lack of access to quality and supportive education, poor mental health and growing up in neighborhoods with limited resources and services.”
As KAVI’s founder and executive director, he told Mullins that when patients come in his first goal is to “keep you alive, then after that we start looking at the risk factors that may cause you to reengaging in some things that may not be safe.” Some people who live in high-crime areas just expect that their future involves incarceration. “This is systemic trauma,” Gore said, “that has been going on from generation to generation and we are talking about altering lifestyles and assessing that person’s level of safety.”
There are 3 different elements to KAVI: hospital, school and community based intervention, Gore said. “We have workshops that we do at the hospital in terms of training and development with our social worker staff, but we also do workshops within the schools themselves and then we also work directly with patients.”
Gore said some students that come by their room just need a space to sit because they have been dealing with a whole lot of stuff and so the student’s see that “having a place where you have staff members who are trained to engage with you and understand and have a genuine concern for your overall wellbeing is important.”
To learn more about KAVI and the programs they offer, go to kavibrooklyn.org.