About the ECHO Curriculum

The ECHO Curriculum

The University of Chicago Crime Lab and Education Lab has worked with community-based practitioners and violence prevention experts to develop an open-source, evidence-informed decision-making curriculum designed for and with young people. The ECHO curriculum (Every Choice Has Opportunity) was designed for young people ages 13–21 who may have limited connection to school or work and/or be at risk of involvement in gun violence. Many of the skills are also relevant and transferable to other groups, including adolescents more broadly and older adults at high risk for violence. 

The goal is to make the curriculum and accompanying implementation manual available to any youth-serving organization worldwide such that they could easily access and incorporate the skill-building lessons into their existing mentoring or school-based violence-prevention programming free of charge. At the heart of this work is the idea that while many organizations might be able to identify, engage and serve participants with a variety of programming, they might not always be focused on the specific kinds of skill building activities that are connected to improving participants’ long-term well-being.  

Designing ECHO with Practitioners and Youth

The ECHO Curriculum was developed by a diverse group of practitioners from twelve different community organizations during a 9-month design table collaboration. The individuals on the design table represented the following organizations: Breakthrough, Brightpoint, CRED, Enlace, the Institute for Nonviolence, Metropolitan Peace Initiatives, Noble Schools, Roca, UCAN, Youth Advocate Programs, Youth Guidance, and the Youth Peace Center of Roseland. Many of the design table participants represented programs that have been subject to rigorous evaluation and shown to be effective in reducing violence involvement and increasing school attachment for youth. Members met monthly to determine what skills the curriculum should prioritize, how to teach them, and how to reinforce them with examples and exercises. The ECHO curriculum distills the core skills that these practitioners believe drove those positive program effects. 

A Youth Advisory Council, comprised of 13 young people with similar experiences to ECHO’s intended audience, then vetted the modules to ensure they were relevant and engaging. These individuals met with the University of Chicago team met monthly over the course of 6 months, walking through curriculum content and providing their feedback on each module. 

As the ECHO curriculum neared completion, we worked with our design table partners willing to run pilots of the program modules. In these pilots, partner organizations used the ECHO curriculum as a complement to their existing programs serving youth and their families. Within each pilot, the curriculum was delivered by the same staff who normally lead programming, whether they were licensed clinicians, outreach workers, or other staff. Feedback from these pilots were then incorporated into the curriculum and implementation manual.   

Scroll down to learn more about the people behind ECHO. 

How Organizations Can Use ECHO

The curriculum offers flexible materials that focus on the skills most central to keeping young people safe from violence and productively engaged in school. It is designed so that it can be delivered in three different modalities:  

1. A sequential, closed, group-based application 
2. An open, drop-in, group-based setting 
3. 5-minute quick connect mini lessons 

The program manual has been designed to simply plug in high-quality decision-making lessons to existing youth programming. (It should be noted that while ECHO has been developed from practitioners working in evidence-based programs, the curriculum content has not been tested itself.)  

Click ​here to explore the ECHO curriculum.