News and entertainment media often speak of "accidents" when referring to unintentional injuries. Although these incidents—such as car crashes, falls, poisonings, and drowning—may be unforeseen, they are neither isolated nor arbitrary. More importantly, these events are both predictable and preventable. This viewpoint is at the heart of Prevention Institute's longstanding commitment to unintentional injury prevention.
Many of the Institute's efforts have focused on training and strategy development for communities aiming to reduce injuries. The Institute has helped pioneer the notion that collaboration among diverse sectors can add resources, creativity, and clout to efforts that may be less likely to succeed otherwise. In the spirit of cross-sectoral collaboration, Prevention Institute helped create the UC Berkeley Traffic Safety Center, by bringing together researchers and practitioners from fields such as planning, health, and vision sciences.
The Institute places equity at the center of its approach to injury prevention by prioritizing training, strategy development, and implementation in the most vulnerable communities. Through support from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the Institute worked with high-school aged youth to develop and pilot the Youth Educational Project (YEP). Recently, the Institute outlined ways to use the upcoming authorization of the new multi-year, multi-billion dollar federal transportation bill as a springboard for solving traffic safety issues, and has spearheaded the American Public Health Association's policy resolution on health and equity impacts from transportation and land-use policies. Prevention Institute has linked injury prevention to other transportation-related concerns, such as respiratory illnesses; chronic diseases that result, in part, from physical inactivity; environmental issues, social justice; and access to social and economic opportunity.