Building thriving communities helps foster mental health and wellbeing for everyone. When community members feel connected and have safe places to gather, and when they have access to affordable housing and good jobs, they experience less stress and anxiety. Conversely, exposure to repeated violence, displacement, and other traumas—or Adverse Community Experiences—undermines communities’ and individuals’ wellbeing.
Prevention Institute collaborates with a range of community partners to shift policies, practices, and norms to create conditions that support mental health and resilience. We partner with community-based coalitions to shape strategies that reflect their priorities and draw on their history, culture, strengths, and assets. Transformation may start with creating a safe space for young men at a bike shop, or engaging faith leaders to help de-stigmatize depression, or connecting veterans to ease re-entry to civilian life. These community changes, large and small, along with the collaborations required to make them happen, ultimately strengthen mental health and wellbeing across communities.
PI works with a breadth of partners and communities to develop strategies and practices to keep people healthy and safe in the first place. Below is a selection of ongoing or recent projects.
Communities of Care is an initiative that supports collaborative approaches to wellbeing in the greater Houston Metropolitan Area, with a focus on children and youth of color and their families. Its goal is to strengthen efforts to transform the environments where people live, learn, work, play, and pray to support resilience, mental health, and wellbeing.
Making Connections for Mental Health and Wellbeing Among Men and Boys is a national initiative to transform community conditions that influence mental wellbeing. Thirteen communities across the U.S. are developing and activating strategies to improve conditions that can affect the wellbeing of men, boys and their families, including social connections, economic and educational opportunities and assets, and improvements in the physical environment.The Movember Foundation is funding the work; Prevention Institute is providing coordination, training, and technical assistance; and a team from the University of South Florida is evaluating progress and outcomes.
Until now, there has been no basis for understanding how community trauma undermines resilience and mental wellbeing, especially in communities highly impacted by violence, and what can be done about it. With the support of Kaiser Permanente Community Benefit, PI and Dr. Howard Pinderhughes developed the Adverse Community Experiences and Resilience (ACE|R) framework. PI also works with communities, sectors, and policymakers to address and prevent community trauma, and to foster community resilience.
Prevention Institute and the Center for the Study of Social Policy collaborated to identify the strategic policy, practice, systems, and norms change levers to make communities safer, so that all children have the opportunity to develop optimally and participate fully in the fabric of community life.
COVID-19 and the national outcry for racial justice has illuminated a need for coordinated, culturally-specific and proactive ACEs and suicide prevention efforts. Through a cooperative agreement with the CDC, PI has partnered with the National League of Cities and Dr. Howard Pinderhughes to offer training and tools to local government and their partners in supporting their communities.
Through a cooperative agreement with the CDC, PI has partnered with RTI International and CLASP to update the technical package content and develop modules that provide a foundation for activities during periods of infrastructure disruption.
We research and write reports, white papers, fact sheets, opinion pieces, and journal articles, as well as produce videos and podcasts. Here are some of our latest offerings.
Mental health is at the heart of many of the challenges we face, including trauma and adverse childhood experiences, social isolation, institutionalized bias and discrimination, and ‘diseases of despair’ that manifest in depression, suicide, and substance misuse. Addressing social determinants of health is key to helping communities navigate adversity, heal, and flourish. PI’s report, Back to Our Roots: Catalyzing Community Action for Mental Health and Wellbeing, illustrates how improving community conditions can reduce the incidence and intensity of mental health challenges, and help activate resilience.
This report was developed by Prevention Institute for the Movember Foundation to help shape its strategic direction and resource allocation for its mental health focus in the U.S. The report describes the mental health landscape in the U.S. and, in particular, the mental health and wellbeing of boys and men.
This first-of-its-kind framework explores trauma at a community level. It explains how trauma is produced not only by experiencing interpersonal violence but also by experiencing structural violence – the harm that individuals, families, and communities experience from the economic and social structure; social institutions; and social relations of power, privilege and inequity that inhibit them from meeting their basic needs.
What? Why? How? Answers to Frequently Asked Questions About the Adverse Community Experiences and Resilience Framework builds off of core concepts in the Adverse Community Experiences and Resilience Framework and addresses questions that have emerged in early practice and implementation.
Since the initial development of the Adverse Community Experiences and Resilience Framework in 2016, multiple networks and communities have shared it, as well as adopted, adapted and/or implemented it to address and prevent community trauma. Adverse Community Experiences and Resilience: Learning from Practice reflects valuable lessons from their practice.
We have developed a broad range of practical, free-to-use tools to guide practitioners, advocates, and policymakers in planning and implementing prevention strategies. We also provide Services to help you use our tools to create healthy and safe communities.
THRIVE is a tool for assessing the status of community conditions and prioritizing them for action to improve health, safety, and health equity.
The Spectrum of Prevention is a systematic tool that promotes a multifaceted range of activities for effective prevention. The Spectrum identifies multiple levels of intervention and helps people move beyond the perception that prevention is merely education and serves as a framework for a more comprehensive understanding of prevention that includes six levels for strategy development.
These profiles, written by PI and our partners, show what community prevention looks like on the ground, all across the country.
MC Team Lead Becca Krauss is a psychotherapist at Mount Sinai Hospital. Advancing mental health requires clinical expertise and recognition that wellbeing happens at a community level. When violent crime is common, so are trauma and toxic stress which play out in settings like classrooms and playgrounds.
Through Making Connections the Southern Plains Tribal Health Board staff are making suicide prevention among American Indian youth a priority. The project empowers students in Anadarko and the Oklahoma City area to address and prevent suicide among their peers.
UWEAST and its partner organizations work to prevent suicide. They have opened up a dialogue about mental health with community members; encouraged faith leaders to speak out about post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and suicide; and partnered with other local organizations to provide young men with leadership and career development training.
