Prevention Resources

Community Organizing

Alameda County Violence Prevention Blueprint - A Lifetime Commitment to Violence Prevention: The Alameda County Blueprint
This Blueprint provides an example of a community organizing process focusing on violence prevention. The process was facilitated by The Prevention Institute.

Building Bridges, Creating Partnerships: Sexual Violence Prevention in Rural Communities
This resource focuses on the use of community development strategies as a basis for sexual violence prevention work in rural communities.

Collaboration Math
Developed by the Prevention Institute. This tool helps organizations from diverse disciplines work together. It enables them to better understand each other's perspectives and to identify both strengths and gaps in their partnership. This tool is designed to eliminate misconceptions, clarify the benefits of collaborative participation, determine what needs to be better understood, and identify key players that may be missing.

Community Action Kit
The Community Action Kit is designed to serve as a tool for all advocates whether they are students, parents, teachers, school administrators, health professionals, youth-serving professionals, policymakers, or concerned community members. It provides advocates with the tools they need to become knowledgeable about sexuality education, build support in their state or community, work to implement sound policies, and institute or defend an effective comprehensive sexuality education program. Web visitors can download the entire kit free of charge or just print the pieces they need. (2005)

Community Development and Sexual Violence Prevention: Creating Partnerships for Social Change
This manual in intended as practical guide for programs to use to incorporate the community development model into their existing sexual violence prevention work.

Creating Partnerships with Faith Communities to End Sexual Violence
This document was written to encourage advocates to think about new ways to partner with faith communities to prevent sexual violence. It is applicable to those who are interested in working within their own faith community, or in building partnerships between community-based organizations and faith communities.

Developing Effective Coalitions: An Eight Step Guide
Developed by the Prevention Institute. This paper is written from the perspective of an organization considering initiating and leading a coalition, but can be helpful to anyone eager to strengthen a coalition in which he or she participates.

Discovering Community Power: A Guide to Mobilizing Local Assets and Your Organization's Capacity
This workbook, published by the ABCD Institute, in conjunction with the Foundation's Social and Economic Development team, is a useful tool for helping to assess readiness and capacity in communities and organizations, and can be customized to meet the needs of specific program areas.

Integrating Community Building and Violence Prevention
Using a three-pronged approach – key informant interviews, a national strategy meeting, and dissemination of lessons learned – the project served to (1) identify opportunities to weave together the work of the violence prevention and community building fields; (2) understand lessons from and challenges to overlapping efforts; and (3) develop and disseminate recommended actions.

Preventing Family Violence: Community Engagement Makes the Difference
Preventing Family Violence: Community Engagement Makes the Difference looks at some of the lessons learned from organizations and systems across the country that are using community mobilization strategies to reach out to families that need help and to involve community residents, service providers and institutions in preventing family violence. The report discusses five goals that emerged and includes descriptions of programs addressing each goal. Additionally, the report identifies practical guidelines that are critical to effective efforts to prevent family violence.

Preventing Family Violence: Lessons from the Community Engagement Initiative
This handbook distills learnings about organizing at the community level and provides advice culled from the experiences of site leaders and other seasoned organizers. It is intended for anyone who wants to initiate or expand family violence prevention work, including agencies addressing family and community health, community development groups, and grassroots leaders. It includes information on getting started, strategies for effective engagement, advice on funding a project, and information on measuring a project's effectiveness.

The Tension of Turf: Making it Work for the Coalition
Developed by the Prevention Institute. Turf is a frequent problem that is often misunderstood. The paper discusses common types of turf struggles, reasons why they occur, and lists a set of recommendations for limiting the negative aspects of turf.

Transforming Communities: A Model for Community Organizing Creating Safety and Justice for Women and Girls
The Transforming Communities information packet describes the Novato Community Demonstration Project experiences including: the project's focus on changing social belief systems (its primary vs. secondary vs. tertiary prevention efforts); the steps involved in mobilizing Community Action Teams (CAT) of volunteer community members to run activism campaigns; a description of a CAT organizer's role; descriptions of the Novato Project implementation including initial recruitment strategies and case studies of their Media CAT and TEEN CAT; and, its evaluation process, barriers faced and lessons learned, and several issues that emerged during the project (e.g. issues specific to teenage girls versus adult men, or adult women; community awareness, funding issues, etc.).

Links

Center for Community Change
The Center for Community Change builds and strengthens grassroots organizations by: providing strategic assistance; stimulating organizing in particular parts of the country or within key constituencies; building relationships among grassroots organizations that cross the dividing lines of race, gender and geography; investing in the development of organizing talent; supporting non-traditional, experimental, or hybrid approaches to organizing that show great promise; and perhaps most importantly, by aligning grassroots organizations, allies and resource providers around a common political vision, message and strategy.

Institute for Community Peace
The Institute for Community Peace promotes a safe, healthy and peaceful nation by mobilizing community resources and leadership.