The Guidelines

Built by Diverse Community Partnerships

Effective strategies are developed through relationship building that prioritize collaboration, creativity, and reciprocal learning. Prevention staff value and center the experiences and expertise of community partners to better address root causes, and to deepen community understanding of and commitment to SV/DV prevention.
Partnerships must include communities that are most at risk or vulnerable to violence and have been historically marginalized and oppressed Intentional partnerships are rooted in empowerment; prevention staff recognize and build upon existing community strengths. 
Prevention staff can maximize impact by forming relationships based on shared risk and protective factors and utilize similar strategies between organizations and across populations.

“Movements are born of critical connections rather than critical mass.”

— Grace Lee Boggs

This blog post from Interaction Institute for Social Change helps us to distinguish between community mobilization and community organizing.
#ThisGENwill: Empowering Youth as Allies, Stakeholders & Leaders is an example of a strategy for building youth capacity to take action in their communities to prevent violence.
The Florida Coalition Against Domestic Violence’s Youth Advisory Board developed the Youth Activist Prevention Toolkit to provide ideas for youth activists, to educate others about teen dating violence, and to take action in their communities and schools.
Youth Connectedness Is an Important Protective Factor for Health and Well-being illustrates that school and community connectedness is a protective factor that crosses many issues that create risk for youth creating an opportunity for communities to align their efforts.
Connecting the Dots: An Overview of the Links Among Multiple Forms of Violence published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention highlights common protective factors that increase well-being in later life.
In this podcast episode, Ruben Cantu of Prevention Institute and Kathryn Evans of Rooted Strategy interview network leaders from Mobilizing Action for Resilient Communities (MARC). Ruben and Kathryn talk with Yusuf Ali, Soojin Conover and Suzeth Dunn from Boston’s Vital Village Network about using data to effect change.