Volunteer Award 2006
Billie Weiss—Associate Director
SCIPRC at UCLA School of Public Health

Billie has been an ally and intrepid supporter of LACAAW, diligently sharing her in-depth expertise, knowledge and contacts to help build our programs and services. Billie’s expertise focuses on the epidemiology of intimate partner violence, gang homicides and assaults, intentional and unintentional injuries, and evaluation of programs to reduce teen relationship and gang violence. She is one of the first public health practitioners to include sexual assault and domestic violence prevention within the public health model. Accordingly, she was instrumental in helping LACAAW expand its entire prevention education platform beyond a feminist and criminal justice approach, to include the larger public health framework.

Billie has served on LACAAW’s advisory board since 1993, and helped shape several of our key education programs, most notably our nationally recognized “In Touch With Teen” Youth Violence Prevention Curriculum. She directed an outside evaluation of the curriculum to determine its effectiveness. The results of the evaluation provided scientific data to legitimize the anecdotal research that LACAAW already surmised, further increasing the adoption of the curriculum by many agencies across the state and country. Billie’s emphasis on research and evaluation helped shape the development of programming at LACAAW.

Billie is the founder and Executive Director Emeritus of the Violence Prevention Coalition of Greater Los Angeles (VPCLA), a premiere coalition in Los Angeles County dedicated to identifying the social policies and processes which can prevent, control, and reduce violence. She received a BS from Cal. State Fullerton, and a Master of Public Health in Epidemiology from UCLA. She currently works as the Associate Director of the Southern California Injury Prevention Research Center at the UCLA School of Public Health and was the former director of the L.A. County Department of Health Services Injury and Violence Prevention Program.

Billie’s support has made a difference not only in the success of LACAAW’s work but our strong reputation in the violence prevention field. She has been a friend and volunteer for over 15 years and Peace Over Violence is honored to present her with the 2006 Volunteer Humanitarian Award.