CDC's $30M Youth Violence Prevention Centers Return: What RFA-CE-27-013 Asks of Academic PIs

Academic principal investigators and NIH-funded violence researchers now have a $30 million target on the calendar: the CDC has posted a forecast for RFA-CE-27-013, the next competition for its National Centers of Excellence in Youth Violence Prevention, on Grants.gov as opportunity 363055.

For labs that build careers around rigorous evaluation, this is one of the few federal mechanisms that pays academic teams to run controlled tests of community-level violence-prevention approaches at real scale — and to do it over a five-year center grant, not a two-year pilot.

What the Grants.gov forecast actually commits to

The forecast lives at grants.gov/search-results-detail/363055, where the CDC's National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (NCIPC) has laid out the shape of the competition without yet publishing the full notice of funding opportunity. The numbers are firm enough to plan around: an estimated $30,000,000 in total program funding, an award ceiling of $1,200,000 per recipient, and roughly five awards expected. There is no cost-sharing or matching requirement, and the work falls under Assistance Listing 93.136 (Injury Prevention and Control Research). The full NOFO is estimated to post on October 1, 2026, with applications due December 1, 2026 at 11:59 p.m. ET, awards on August 28, 2027, and projects starting September 30, 2027 in fiscal year 2027.

If those figures look familiar, they should. The current cohort of Youth Violence Prevention Centers was funded under RFA-CE-21-005 in 2021 at the same $30 million ceiling and the same five-center structure. RFA-CE-27-013 is the renewal of that program — the same architecture, a new five-year cycle, and a subtly rewritten scope. The 2021 announcement asked for "Rigorous Evaluation of Prevention Strategies to Prevent and Reduce Community Rates of Youth Violence." The 2027 forecast reframes it as "Rigorous Evaluation of Prevention Approaches to Prevent and Reduce Youth Violence." The dropped word "community" from the title is not an accident, and it hints at where the review criteria are heading.

Who the CDC wants running these centers

The forecast defines the target population precisely: youth aged 10 to 24 in communities with rates of youth violence higher than the national average. That framing matters for how you scope a proposal. This is not an urban-only program by statute, but the "higher than the national average" language pushes applicants toward places with a documented burden — and toward the surveillance data to prove it.

The eligibility list is deliberately wide. Private and public universities, state and local governments, tribal governments and organizations, nonprofits with and without 501(c)(3) status, small businesses, and even for-profit entities can all apply. In practice, though, the last two cohorts of YVPCs have been anchored at research universities — the University of Michigan, the University of Chicago, Virginia Commonwealth University, and their peers — because the mechanism demands something most community organizations cannot supply on their own: the capacity to design and defend a rigorous evaluation. That is the academic PI's leverage here. The center grant is built around your methodological credibility.

The four core elements you are graded on

The forecast spells out four core elements, and a competitive application has to demonstrate all four rather than lead with one and gesture at the rest.

The first is administrative capacity — a real infrastructure inside the center to run implementation, evaluation, and dissemination, not a subcontract stapled to a research plan. The second, and the one that separates funded from unfunded, is research and rigorous evaluation: each YVPC must rigorously evaluate at least two distinct violence-prevention approaches, and those approaches must map onto at least two of the priority research areas the eventual NOFO will name. This is where reviewers will look for a defensible design — randomization or a strong quasi-experimental counterfactual, adequate power, and validated outcome measures rather than program-satisfaction surveys.

The third element is collaboration and engagement. The CDC expects genuine partnership with local organizations, plus a youth advisory council standing in each intervention community. The fourth is training and education: every center must fold in structured training for early-career researchers, woven into the center's actual work rather than run as a detached seminar.

Why the community partner is the real gate

The dropped word "community" in the title is misleading in one respect: community partnership is more central to this mechanism, not less. A YVPC is, functionally, an academic evaluation engine bolted onto a community-based organization that owns the relationships, the trust, and the on-the-ground delivery of the prevention approaches. The PI brings the study design; the CBO brings the setting and the participants. Neither wins the award alone.

That has a scheduling consequence most first-time applicants underestimate. If you do not already have a working relationship with a CBO in a high-burden community, the roughly ten weeks between the estimated October 1 NOFO posting and the December 1 due date is not enough time to build one from scratch and write a credible engagement plan around it. Reviewers can tell the difference between a letter of support signed last month and a partnership with a track record. The teams that win RFA-CE-27-013 are, in most cases, already talking to their partners today — five months before the notice even posts.

The same is true for the youth advisory council requirement. A council is easy to promise and hard to stand up. Applicants who can describe an existing youth engagement structure, or a concrete plan grounded in an existing partner's infrastructure, will read as ready in a way that aspirational language cannot fake.

Reading the timeline as a work-back schedule

Treat the forecast dates as a project plan. Working backward from an estimated December 1, 2026 deadline, an academic team needs its two prevention approaches and its evaluation designs locked by roughly late October — because the second half of November belongs to budget, biosketches, letters, and the mechanical grind of a full center application through your sponsored-programs office. That puts the intellectual work squarely in the fall, and the partnership work in the summer.

A few things you can do now, before the NOFO exists, are low-regret regardless of how the final criteria read. Pull the priority research areas from RFA-CE-21-005 and the CDC's youth-violence technical packages as a proxy for what the 2027 areas will emphasize. Confirm your CBO partner and get the relationship on paper. Line up your community's youth-violence surveillance data so you can document a rate above the national average. And identify the early-career researchers whose training you will build the center around, since that element is scored, not optional.

One caution: this is a forecast, not a posted opportunity. Dates, the exact award count, and the priority research areas can shift when the real NOFO lands on or around October 1. The $30 million envelope and the five-center structure have held steady across two cycles, so they are reasonable to plan against — but nothing binds until the notice publishes. The CDC contact on the forecast is Joyce Dieterly at NCIPC (ncipc_erpo@cdc.gov), and monitoring the listing for the status flip from "forecasted" to "posted" is the single most important thing on your calendar between now and October.

Where to start this week

The advantage in a center-grant competition compounds early. The PIs who treat July as prep time — not October — are the ones who submit a partnership with history instead of a partnership with promise. If you want to see what else NCIPC and its sister injury-prevention programs have open while you build toward the December deadline, search active CDC injury and violence prevention solicitations on Granted at grantedai.com/grants?q=youth+violence+prevention+CDC to map the adjacent mechanisms and co-funding paths worth lining up now.

And if you are newer to federal center grants and want the fundamentals on structuring a multi-partner application before the NOFO drops, Granted's blog breaks down the moving pieces — evaluation design, budget justification, and partnership documentation — that reviewers weigh most heavily. RFA-CE-27-013 will reward the teams that did that homework in the summer, not the ones scrambling in November.