Rachel Davis , MSW, Managing Director

Prevention Institute

rachel@preventioninstitute.org

Rachel oversees the development and implementation of a range of primary prevention projects, particularly in the areas of violence prevention, health disparities, mental health, and children and youth. She develops tools for advancing primary prevention, provides consulting and training for various community and government organizations, and advances the conceptual work of the organization.

Rachel supervises projects, conducts research, and facilitates strategic planning, coalitions, and trainings addressing community violence, youth violence, violence against women, and the intersection of violence prevention and early childhood development. Examples include facilitating a statewide interagency violence prevention partnership in California's state government, evaluating a community-wide violence prevention effort, writing state and county violence plans, and conducting training for federal violence prevention grantees. She conducted Focus Forums across the country, gathering regional input to shape national injury and violence prevention strategy for Safe USA. Rachel co-taught a violence prevention graduate course in the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley. In addition, she contributed to the Partnerships for Preventing Violence satellite training series through research, script development, facilitator training, and project management. Previously she was an advisor on Violence Prevention to the Federal Office of Maternal and Child Health and the fifty states via Children's Safety Network/Education Development Center.

Rachel is the project director of THRIVE (Tool for Health and Resilience In Vulnerable Environments), funded by the Federal Office of Minority Health, to develop a community resilience assessment tool that will aid in the reduction of disparities. She also co-authored Health for All: California's Strategic Approach to Eliminating Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities, co-chaired by the American Public Health Association and the California Health and Human Services Agency. She has also researched and written other papers on preventive approaches to addressing health disparities and conducted training on the topic.

With a background in mental health, Rachel has taken the lead on the Institute's mental health efforts. This has included documenting the effectiveness of preventive and early intervention approaches for the Center for Mental Health Services, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and conducting training and technical assistance to mental health program staff. Rachel directed script development for "The Three R's for Dealing with Trauma in Schools: Readiness, Response, and Recovery," a training focusing on the impact of multi-level mental health services in schools, the importance of incorporating mental health into school safety plans, and the value of promoting resilience in the school community before the occurrence of a traumatizing event.

As a school social worker and counselor in the San Francisco Unified School District, she was responsible for the development and implementation of prevention and intervention programs for health, mental health, and violence. Formerly, she was a trainer and curriculum developer for Oracle Corporation. She received her masters in social welfare from UC Berkeley and her bachelors degree in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania.

Return to top of page

Putting Prevention at the Center of Community Well Being
www.preventioninstitute.org