Safety

With funding from the Blue Shield of California Foundation, Prevention Institute launched Safety Through Connection, a program that supports community-based groups working to prevent intimate partner violence (IPV). A unique feature of the program is that it brings organizations that work on other issues—from nutrition and physical activity to worker rights to mental health—into the conversation about preventing IPV and promoting safe relationships.

With support from The Langeloth Foundation, Prevention Institute (PI) is partnering with local communities and national networks to amplify support for a public health approach to preventing violence, while we cement our gains from the last decade and continue to innovate.

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.

For more than 10 years, PI and the California Coalition Against Sexual Assault (CALCASA) have brought together this community of practice to strengthen primary prevention of sexual and domestic violence.

Since 2005, Prevention Institute has supported dozens of large U.S. cities to prevent urban violence through the UNITY initiative. UNITY advances a public health approach and works closely with the UNITY City Network to develop prevention strategies that address violence before it occurs.

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.

With support from the Blue Shield of California Foundation, Prevention Institute’s SAFE initiative engages leaders in California to envision and design innovative, multisector, health equity strategies to prevent domestic violence.

Through intensive collaboration with local groups, Prevention Institute has directly shaped how cities and counties approach the issue of violence and has improved prevention practice broadly.

Prevention Institute is a member of the WHO’s global Violence Prevention Alliance (VPA), a network of WHO Member States, international agencies and civil society organizations working to prevent violence.

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.

This collection includes a range of Prevention Institute publications on preventing multiple forms of violence and trauma.

With support from the Blue Shield of California Foundation, and in partnership with representatives from multiple sectors, including domestic violence prevention advocates, and researchers, Prevention Institute developed SAFE (Sectors Acting For Equity) approach. The SAFE approach offers research, analysis, and frameworks to understand and advance a health equity and multisector approach to preventing domestic violence. 

This collection includes a range of Prevention Institute publications with guidance on incorporating violence prevention into land use and community development decisions.

This report by Prevention Institute and the Center for the Study of Social Policy makes the case for action and delineates opportunities for systems, policy, and practice change at the intersection of community safety and positive early child development. For example, emergent opportunities at the intersection include changing norms about fathers and fatherhood through systems and practice change; engaging the community development sector to address housing issues through policies and practices; and building the early education to employment pipeline through state and local policy change.

​Through the leadership of coalitions like the California Partnership to End Domestic Violence (the Partnership) and the California Work and Family Coalition, momentum is already building to promote economic security in support of safe relationships. With that, there is a need to better understand the connections between economic security and partner violence and learn from communities implementing strategies to improve economic security and decrease violence. This brief unpacks these connections and illustrates examples of actions across Prevention Institute’s Spectrum of Prevention. 

This report offers research, analysis, frameworks, and practitioner wisdom to understand the factors in the community environment that support safe relationships and a reduction in domestic violence (DV). It identifies opportunities for 13 sectors to engage in DV prevention, and offers a method for multiple sectors to identify joint strengths, strategies, and outcomes. The paper presents an overarching approach to advancing a health equity and multisector approach to DV prevention, and identifies broad elements and immediate next steps to move this approach forward.

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.

To clarify the relationships among eight forms of violence, Prevention Institute developed Connecting the Dots with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to build a case for practitioners to coordinate their efforts, increase their impact, and work toward preventing multiple forms of violence at once.

With support from the Violence Prevention Alliance and Global Partnership to End Violence Against Children, Prevention Institute developed this resource to offer PI’s Collaboration Multiplier as a tool for those wanting to initiate or advance multisector efforts to prevent violence, particularly in low- and middle-income countries.

This document by PI and Cities United provides talking points for people who want to make the case for a public health approach to preventing violence.

To help you get to know the UNITY RoadMap, UNITY has created an interactive experience that lets you navigate through the elements, read related articles, and watch video clips to learn more about how to effectively and sustainably prevent violence.

There is growing recognition that many sectors must be engaged to effectively prevent violence, but people don't always know what they bring to the table or how their sector can pitch in. This publication clarifies the roles and contributions of 10 sectors and 12 departments, and walks readers through Collaboration Multiplier, an influential Prevention Institute tool.

This document describes a framework that incorporates public health, law enforcement, social service, and education perspectives in preventing violence. Violence is among the most serious health threats in the nation today, jeopardizing the health and safety of the public. Recognizing that law enforcement alone cannot solve the problem of violence, practitioners have increasingly turned toward a broader, more comprehensive approach.

Recognizing that adolescence is a critical time period where behaviors are formed that frequently carry over to adulthood, these initiatives meet young men where they are, with the goal of instilling healthy norms. The Making Connections initiative in Houston embarked on a journey to develop and facilitate a series of conversations on the topics of healthy relationships, unhealthy norms around masculinity and alternative models for healthy masculinity, and teen dating violence. 

Cathy Costa presented Baltimore’s Maternal and Child Health (MCH) and violence prevention efforts at the 2016 City MatCH Leadership and MCH Epidemiology Conference. Baltimore has been a long-time member of Prevention Institute’s UNITY City Network. The narrative is excerpted from Cathy’s presentation at this September 2016 event in Philadelphia, PA.

As one of eight communities in the California Accountable Communities for Health Initiative, the East San Jose Peace Partnership has used ACE|R as its overarching framework. This emphasis has helped the project to remain focused on community level change strategies and provided a structure for expanding its focus to address multiple forms of violence.

In November 2017, Milwaukee released its Blueprint for Peace. Grounded in the Framework, the Blueprint identifies forms of violence and structural violence and draws on community assets and best practices to focus on preventing violence, as well as intervention efforts to ameliorate the impacts of violence and prevent future perpetration and victimization. 

The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment has adopted hotspot mapping as part of its strategic plan to prevent sexual violence and related safety and health issues. The process brings school communities together to physically map safe and unsafe spaces, while building trusting relationships and empowering youth to be part of developing solutions. Twelve schools in Colorado are piloting this initiative to improving school climate and prevent multiple forms of violence, including sexual and teen dating violence.