Deane Calhoun is the founder and former executive director of Youth Alive, a nonprofit public health agency founded in 1991 and dedicated to preventing youth violence and generating youth leadership in California communities. Youth Alive has offices in Oakland and Los Angeles and runs two programs: Caught in the Crossfire, an intervention program for youth hospitalized as a result of violent injuries, and Teens on Target, a peer leadership and violence prevention program that trains young people from neighborhoods with high rates of violence to provide peer education to middle school students. Calhoun, a public health activist, was inspired to work on preventing youth violence when she discovered in the mid-80s that gun violence had become the leading killer of young people in this country and that Oakland had the highest rate of gun homicide of any city in the state of California.