The City of San Francisco has released its Violence Prevention Plan, adopting the "Alive and Free" methodology developed at the Omega Boys Club by Dr. Joe Marshall (a finalist in the Changemakers "Young Men at Risk" collaborative competition) as San Francisco’s overarching violence prevention philosophy. The program will be utilized in all city-funded programs working in detention facilities, schools, vulnerable communities, after-school programs, treatment facilities and with law enforcement through required and necessary training and capacity building.

The occasion marked "a memorable and historic day for the Omega Boys Club/Street Soldiers," said said Dr. Joe Marshall, Founder/Executive Director of the Omega Boys Club and Police Commissioner. "Our goal is to promote the message of Alive and Free with the people and places our young people come in contact with – schools, hospitals, churches, stores, buses, recreation centers. This means out of harm’s way, and free from incarceration.”

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom released San Francisco’s Violence Prevention Plan at the Omega Boys Club offices on July 3, saying it "is a blueprint for how we collectively—as a city family and community—come together to transform San Francisco streets and neighborhoods into healthy, safe environments. The Violence Prevention Plan focuses on both the immediate response and long-term solutions to mitigating the problem of violence on our streets.”

As part of the release of the plan, Mayor Newsom unveiled the “Alive and Free” public education campaign and summer resource guide. The Alive and Free methodology has been recognized by the Annie E. Casey Foundation as one of 15 promising national practices for preventing violence.

Marshall is an Ashoka Fellow who has discovered a cure for a communicable disease that is the number one cause of death for people aged 10-24 in the United States: violence. By approaching it as a treatable illness, Marshall’s Street Soldiers avoids the dysfunctional response of judgmental labeling of participants and it gives responders a way of seeing past the social blinders of race, class and urbanity to address a universal problem in our societies.

Participants are put through a four-step program that involves retraining thought processes, recognizing and eliminating risk factors, and adopting new tools for living. Since his treatment program began in 1995, not one of Marshall's “soldiers” has been lost to violence.

San Francisco's Violence Prevention Plan has been formally implemented by Mayor Newsom in the executive directive “Implementing San Francisco’s Violence Prevention Plan.” It contains a set of strategies to prevent violence and deal more strategically with factors that contribute to violence. There are five areas of focus of the plan: