Move toward community-centered prevention

Last month, Prevention Institute‘s Annie Lyles and I presented a workshop at Futures Without Violence‘s National Conference on Health and Domestic Violence. We were happy to see a full room of people committed to building community-centered prevention.

The title of our presentation, “Growing Our Impact: Moving from individual awareness building to community norms change strategies as a part of domestic and sexual prevention efforts,” is a mouthful; and it does describe how we need to find ways to create change on the community level if we ever expect to create a world without domestic violence and sexual assault.

At the end of the workshop, Sarah DeCosta of the Elizabeth Buffum Chace Center in Rhode Island (whom I have met through PreventConnect web conferences and Peer Learning Forums), show me her notes summarizing how she saw this shift to community-level thinking.  Thanks to Sarah for showing in one graphic the shift from individual (by connecting to and educating) to community (by connecting with and facilitating).  This is a graphic that I will use for future trainings (including this week in New York.)

Here are the slides for the presentation at the National Conference on Health and Domestic Violence.