How I Found My Place at the 2026 CVI Conference
Reflecting on the Annual Conference as a Behavioral Health Professional
I haven’t always known how exactly I belong in the CVI field.
Even as my work has brought me closer to community violence intervention, I have sometimes struggled to understand where my background in behavioral health fits within the broader field. This year, that started to change.
As associate director of community and survivor advocacy at GIFFORDS Center for Violence Intervention, I’m part of the team that hosts the Community Violence Intervention (CVI) Conference each year. This year, nearly 900 practitioners, researchers, policymakers, funders, advocates, and community leaders came together in Los Angeles to share what they are learning, confront challenges facing the field, and strengthen relationships across communities and disciplines.
As I reflected on why this year felt different, I realized that part of what I was experiencing was the more intentional integration of behavioral health throughout the conference.
Behavioral health professionals can include mental health professionals and others who bring expertise in trauma, grief, mental health, and healing. Their work can take many forms, from supporting people and families impacted by violence to helping CVI practitioners navigate the trauma and loss they encounter through their own work. As CVI work expands, the field is grappling with questions about how we care for the people doing this work, respond to trauma, strengthen community-based systems of support, build evidence, and sustain organizations and practitioners over time.
The CVI Conference creates an opportunity for people who approach those questions from very different perspectives to be in conversation with one another. It’s not a behavioral health gathering; conversations stretched across street outreach and violence interruption, hospital-based intervention, youth engagement, research, workforce development, public policy, storytelling, community healing, and many other dimensions of the field. But seeing behavioral health’s growing presence within that broader conversation reframed the intersection of CVI and behavioral health for me—instead of being something adjacent to CVI, it’s just one part of a much larger ecosystem of work.
As behavioral health practitioners in the field, we have an opportunity to explicitly name how our work uplifts CVI practitioners’ work and plays a key role in community healing. Behavioral health has something important to contribute to a field rooted in responding to violence, trauma, grief, and loss, but that contribution has to be shaped alongside the people and communities already doing this work.
One of the most impactful activities for me at the conference is our remembrance moment, where we invite attendees to honor those who have inspired them in their work. Early on the first day, everyone was able to choose a sticker with a phrase that reminded them of a loved one to place on a community easel board. They could then choose another sticker with something they might want to say to their loved one, or would want to hear from them, and carry it throughout the conference.
This activity offered an early reminder of something that would shine through the rest of the conference: Behind the programs, research, policy, and strategies being discussed are the people and relationships that give this work its meaning. It grounded me in the idea that we all bring our community and family with us into this work, and these connections often become our guiding force.
As I looked at what I had written, and discussed with other attendees about our reasons for being involved in this work, I realized my “why” mirrored those of the other people in the room. It solidified my sense of belonging in the space—we may come to this work through different disciplines and experiences, but seeing those reflections together made those connections much clearer.
I left the conference encouraged by how much more visible the conversations regarding CVI and behavioral health have become and by the possibilities for deeper collaboration ahead. This work is still taking shape, and I’m proud to help GIFFORDS Center for Violence Intervention as we continue to help build it out within the larger CVI community.
This year’s conference illuminated within me a feeling of community. This annual event is not just something to attend, but is a space where I belong and have a blossoming role in contributing to the work. Perhaps that is one of the most important things the conference can offer: the chance to see ourselves as part of something larger. We come together with different experiences, expertise, and reasons for doing this work, and leave with a stronger understanding of how much we need one another to move it forward.
CONVERSATIONS WITH EXPERTS
GIFFORDS Center for Violence Intervention’s webinars explore different aspects of community violence through conversations with experts.
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