Community-engaged intervention and consultation to promote population mental health for youth in underresourced communities: A case example for practicing psychologists.

Psychologists must transcend the walls of traditional specialty care practice to meet the vast unmet mental health needs in the United States, particularly within underresourced communities and for people of color who have been marginalized as a result of structural inequities (Dodge et al., 2024).Responding to recent calls from the American Psychological Association for the field to shift toward a population-health framework to directly address these mental health inequities, this article justifies health service psychologists' use of communityengaged practice to minimize the impact of structural factors such as community violence and underresourced schools on youth mental health.Using the case example of a model program known as the Violence Intervention and Prevention Initiative, we illustrate implementation of community-engagement principles for practicing psychologists who seek to develop community partnerships to promote population mental health.We also discuss how this initiative reflects the recent process-oriented competency model of health service psychology (Wright et al., 2025). Public Significance StatementThis article describes the Violence Intervention and Prevention Initiative to illustrate ways that practicing psychologists may develop, nurture, and sustain partnerships with human service agencies that work with youth in communities with limited access to mental health support.Integrating community partnerships into professional practice could help psychologists intervene early and promote resilience among young people exposed to community-level risk factors for later mental health problems, like concentrated poverty and community violence.