Centering Relationships as Prevention Strategy: Lessons from Relationships First
Preventing violence is not work we do alone. Preventionists have long built coalitions, coordinated across systems, and partnered across sectors to move this work forward. These collaborations are essential and the quality of those relationships, not just the list of partners, shapes what prevention makes possible.
If relationships are part of the strategy, then an important question follows: what does it take to work in ways that are truly equitable, community-led, and sustainable?
A new collection from Community Commons, Relationships First: A Roadmap for Equitable Collaboration with Community-Based Organizations, offers both a reflection and a set of tools to help answer that question. The roadmap invites practitioners to shift how they think about collaboration, not just as a step in the process, but as core infrastructure for prevention.
For those working to transform the conditions that allow violence to occur, this framing is especially powerful.
Why a relationships-first approach matters for prevention
Violence prevention is rooted in the communities where people live, learn, work, and connect. Prevention strategies are stronger when they are shaped by the people most impacted and by the leaders and organizations that are already building safety, connection, and healing in their communities.
This resource names something many prevention practitioners have experienced: equitable outcomes grow from building trust, sharing power, and investing in relationships long-term.
It also challenges prevention practitioners to move beyond familiar patterns. For example, instead of inviting community partners after priorities are already set or asking for feedback on already chosen strategies, this approach asks us to build partnerships where leaders and community organizations help define the vision, shape the strategies, and influence how resources are allocated.
What this looks like in violence prevention practice
Many violence prevention practitioners are already building partnerships in these ways. The roadmap helps to build on that foundation with greater clarity, consistency, and support.
Community-based primary prevention initiatives
In RPE- and DELTA-funded efforts, prevention strategies are often implemented in partnership with culturally specific and community-based organizations.
A relationships-first approach might include co-designing strategies together rather than selecting a program and asking a partner to deliver it or building on existing community strengths, traditions, and social networks.
For example, a prevention initiative focused on community connectedness might be shaped by a culturally specific organization’s approach to healing, storytelling, or mutual aid. In this model, the partner is not an implementer. They are a co-creator of the strategy.
Campus prevention
On campuses, prevention is most effective when it reflects the realities of the students and communities that make up the institution. A relationships-first approach could include engaging students and community-based organizations in setting prevention priorities, compensating them for their expertise and leadership, or designing strategies that reflect the experiences of community students, working students, parenting students, etc.
This is particularly important for community colleges, where safety is deeply connected to basic needs, economic stability, transportation, and housing. Prevention becomes stronger when it is built in partnership with the people and organizations already supporting those needs.
Culturally specific prevention work
Culturally specific organizations have long led efforts that build protective factors against violence, often wit
hout being recognized or funded as prevention leaders.
Equitable collaboration means investing in long-term relationships, not project-based partnerships, recognizing these organizations as prevention experts, and supporting strategies that build connection, cultural identity, and collective care.
These approaches can strengthen the very conditions that make violence less likely.
Rural communities
In many rural communities, relationships are the primary infrastructure for prevention. Working through trusted local leaders and informal networks, showing up consistently, and tapping into community tradition can all help shift prevention from something being brought into a community to something that is grown and sustained by the community.
Relationships are not just the process. They are the strategy.
When prevention is rooted in equitable collaboration, things can really shift. Violence prevention strategies reflect the lived realities of the community and make sense in the local context.
When equitable collaboration is intentional and sustained, trust deepens.. Community partners are no longer connected to a single project or funding cycle. They become part of a longer story. That continuity makes the work more likely
to last, even as staff change or projects evolve, because the relationships themselves hold it in place.
This is often the moment when prevention expands beyond individual programs. The work starts to influence how institutions make decisions, how resources are shared, and how communities define safety and wellbeing for themselves. Change moves through networks, policies, and everyday practices and becomes part of the environment rather than a stand-alone effort.
This approach gives prevention roots. When challenges come, the work does not lose its way because it is grounded in shared purpose and mutual accountability. Like something deeply planted, it can withstand strong winds and changing seasons. The relationships themselves allow for flexibility, creativity, and collective problem solving to continue on.
Explore the resource:
Relationships First: A Roadmap for Equitable Collaboration with Community-Based Organizations