Dr. Joe Griffin, executive director of the violence prevention program Youth ALIVE!, was in his third year as an American Studies major at UC Berkeley when he took a class that opened his eyes to public health.
“I saw this course and I thought it looked interesting. It was the first course where I saw myself reflected,” he says of Public Health 14, then taught by Dr. Bernard Griego, who became one of Griffin’s first mentors. The course takes a multi-disciplinary and anti-racist approach to examine how systems affect community health.
“It was the first time in a lecture hall that I put my hand up,” Griffin said.
“Growing up in Richmond [California] and having experienced a lot of community violence, I lost friends and had friends who were hurt and changed for life,” Griffin said.
That stood in stark contrast to his experience as a student at UC Berkeley.
“Being a local kid and going to Cal, I worked and lived off campus and I would see the difference between the resources on campus and the lack of resources where I lived,” he said. “I knew policing was not the only way we could prevent violence. When I learned about the social determinants of health, I thought here is something we can use.”
He started taking more and more public health courses, eventually getting a master’s in public health through the Health Policy and Management concentration and an interdisciplinary doctor of public health degree.
Coming out of his MPH degree, Griffin gravitated toward policy.
“I did my capstone on hospital-based violence intervention programs,” Griffin says. “I wanted to get into violence prevention but I didn’t know how. I was on craigslist and I saw a job at Youth ALIVE! I didn’t qualify but I applied anyway.” He didn’t get the job, but the then executive director decided that Griffin could be an asset to the organization and created a position for him. Griffin got his start developing policy advocacy.
His academic experience dovetailed perfectly with his new role. “All of a sudden I was on the phone with all these people I’d included in my capstone,” he remembers. “I got to see what I studied.”
After three years at Youth ALIVE!, Griffin took a position at San Francisco General Hospital (now called Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center), eventually managing the Department of Education and Training.
“I learned a lot about how bureaucracy works,” Griffin says. After being accepted to UC Berkeley School of Public Health’s DrPH program, Griffin left SF General and wound up back at Youth ALIVE!, this time as training officer, where he trained groups across the country, including Newark, New Jersey; Richmond, California; the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota; and other locations.
Back at UC Berkeley School of Public Health, Griffin’s doctoral dissertation was called “Beauty in the Struggle: Toxic Stress, Adverse Environments, and Collective Healing.” Concurrently, Griffin worked on a few big projects with Youth ALIVE!, including as a curriculum editor for a violence certificate program.
While he was pursuing his DrPH, Griffin worked under Dr. Jason Corburn, who recently co-authored Advancing peace: Ending urban gun violence through the power of redemptive love.
After subsequent experience with nonprofits in Richmond, Oakland, and Boston, Griffin ended up back in Oakland, this time as Youth ALIVE! Executive director, alongside a role as lecturer at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health, where he is a frequent guest lecturer for a gun violence class with Corburn.
“I kept finding my way back,” Griffin said. “Youth ALIVE! was the first time when I saw people doing this [violence prevention] professionally for a living.”
The program has three pillars:
- Prevention: Peer education in Oakland schools to change norms around community violence and policy advocacy to increase the safety of our communities.
- Intervention: Meeting those most affected by violence immediately before and after conflict through the nation’s first hospital-based violence intervention program (where staff meet violence survivors in hospital settings to provide support and case-management to prevent retaliation and re-injury); violence interruption (conflict mediation and de-escalation in neighborhoods, hospitals, and schools); and school-based life-coaching (intensive mentoring and support for young people at risk of experiencing violence).
- Healing: Crisis response by ensuring families in the aftermath of homicide are not left to navigate their grief alone; and trauma-informed counseling to help individuals with mental health supports as part of their healing journey.
Most Youth ALIVE! staff are individuals who know their communities and the individuals in them, such as the violence interrupters (VI). “These are not positions that you can hire off of LinkedIn,” says Griffin. “Our VIs were doing this work in their community before they worked here. Like elders in their communities. Most of our VIs work in the same part of Oakland they grew up in.”
This means that trusted members of the community are on hand at schools and local parks, community centers, and other hangouts to stop violence before it happens.
Community experts meet with Dr. Jason Corburn, DeVone Boggan, and Dr. Joe Griffin at a G-VITAL meeting at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health.
Their work is effective. Homicides in Oakland dropped to a 25-year low in 2025, to 67, down nearly 50% from 2021.
And yet funding is always an issue. “The overwhelming majority of us who got into this work got into it for personal reasons,” he says. “I always came back to the work because I feel the duty.”
He’s currently finishing a term as a UC Berkeley School of Public Health Social Impact Fellow. He spent his term establishing the UC Berkeley-based G-VITAL Institute with Corburn and DeVone Boggan of Advance Peace, a national community violence prevention organization with its roots in Richmond.
G-VITAL, in partnership with both Advance Peace and Youth ALIVE!, will work with communities to interrupt gun violence through training frontline workers, educators, and social service providers. The group’s first training cohort will start in September 2026.
“We’ll focus on training frontline staff, and then find throughout [the UC Berkeley] campus the research partners who are willing to work with community rather than on them,” says Griffin, who holds the tenets of community-based participatory research dear. The group aims to expand their curriculum across the UC system and then to universities around the world.
Griffin remains grateful for the chance Youth ALIVE! Took with him back when he first reached out and he tries to pay it back when young people reach out to him for career advice. “if it wasn’t for folks who gave me a chance before I felt I was really ready, I wouldn’t be where I am now.”
