Community mobilization and its application to youth violence prevention.

In addressing health and social issues, there has been a shift since the 1990s to approaches that focus more on making comprehensive community-based changes to affect individual behavior. This article provides an overview of community mobilization to engage community members in the process of addressing social and health issues, discusses current models, and provides a case study. The balance of the article looks at other efforts reported in this supplement, and the ways in which they have used community mobilization as a viable strategy for preventing youth violence.