For Immediate Release: March 14, 2022

The City of Alexandria Children & Youth Community Plan 2025 (CYCP) sets long-term priorities and provides a roadmap to success through community-wide coordination and delivery of services to all city children from birth to 21 years-old and their families. 

CYCP 2025 goals include ensuring that all children, youth and families: 1) are physically safe and healthy 2) are academically successful and career ready and 3) have positive experiences.

Each month, the CYCP highlights one of many areas of progress through the CYCP Report Card. For this month, the CYCP looks back at February to feature teen dating violence prevention and healthy relationships.

In the past year, the Alexandria Sexual Assault Center and Domestic Violence Program served 124 youth who experienced sexual and domestic violence. Data on sexual violence is under-reported making the numbers a reflection of whether the community is a place where children and youth feel comfortable reporting these incidents.

Interpersonal and inter-generational violence can be prevented by creating and nurturing healthy identity development and healthy relationships. To this end, several City youth-serving programs combined to hire and train eight teenaged peer advocates through the Keep It 360 Peer Advocate Program. Peer Advocates were empowered to educate youth across Alexandria about healthy relationships and prevention through in-school workshops, social media and forums.

See the February Report Card and find out how Keep It 360 and other CYCP collaborators have worked to prevent sexual violence, the impact their work had on whom, and how individuals and organizations can be involved.

As a partner in the trio comprising the City’s Unified Implementation Team, the Department of Community and Human Services CYCP Coordinator is working with Alexandria City Public Schools and the Alexandria Health Department to align their three respective strategic plans in areas of shared goals. The Team is guided by three principles: 1) trauma-informed approaches to raise awareness of the prevalence of trauma and target root causes 2) racial equity, which aims to correct systems and policies that negatively impact Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) and 3) the use of developmental assets to mitigate adverse childhood experiences.  Learn more about the Unified Implementation Team and their plans.

For inquiries from the news media on the CYCP report card, please contact CYCP Coordinator Chelsea Eickert at 571.447.8132 or chelsea.eickert@alexandriava.gov.

This news release is available at: alexandriava.gov/go/3420

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