SHIFTING THE FOCUS: AN INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACH TO ADVANCING VIOLENCE PREVENTION

History and Background

Shifting the Focus is an interagency violence prevention partnership. Its membership, leaders who represent over 30 departments in California's state government, recognizes that effective violence prevention requires a new way of doing business. This new way of operation will ensure that California communities are well served through practice at the state level that supports success at the local level.

Over the years, as public concern about violence has grown, numerous projects and independent sources of funding have been established. Shifting the Focus is committed to crafting an integrated approach to the state's violence prevention goals without sacrificing current programs or curbing local initiative.

Defining the Problem

Violence is a complex issue that crosses the boundaries between criminal justice, health and human services, and education. Key risk factors for violence include alcohol and other drug abuse, economic inequality, and negative media messages. Similarly, there are key resiliency factors including education, employment, and family support that reduce the potential for violent behavior. Given the scope of such underlying factors, effective violence prevention requires collaboration among multiple disciplines to design comprehensive, multi-faceted initiatives. While some successes at coordination have been seen at the treatment and intervention level (such as multi-service centers), less attention has been paid to interdisciplinary approaches that address violence before it occurs.

Within state government, the responsibility for reducing and preventing violence spans numerous state agencies, departments and programs. Effective violence prevention does not require the mobilization of so-called "violence prevention" resources, but rather the mobilization of a broad array of activities, staff, and resources across departments. Through its innovative, collaborative, multi-disciplinary framework, Shifting the Focus can thus effect real solutions to the complex problem of violence. To develop meaningful collaboration requires a two-pronged effort -- establishing common ground between the vocabulary, data, and philosophies of different disciplines and overcoming the structural, financial, and sometimes political divisions between government sectors. Furthermore, an important challenge of state-level collaboration is the ability to translate this new model of partnering into a system that also works at the local level.

Shifting the Focus addresses the barriers to collaboration by developing strategies to expand partnerships. This effort aims to reengineer state government away from isolated efforts to a broader emphasis on serving communities. Such a methodology is critical because California's violence prevention efforts are far too many for the left hand of government to know what the right hand is doing, unless there is a system purposively designed to manage the collaboration process. Shifting the Focus has identified a strategy to change the way that state government addresses violence prevention.

Background of Shifting the Focus

Shifting the Focus grew out of "The Advanced Training for Violence Prevention Practitioners," a training series conducted by Deborah Prothrow-Stith of the Harvard School of Public Health and Larry Cohen of Prevention Institute. The series, held in 1996, reaffirmed for California representatives of justice, health, and education, the necessity of working in an interdisciplinary mode to address the multiple risk factors that lead to violence.

In recognition that government structures tended to reinforce singular, rather than collaborative approaches, a two-day forum, Shifting the Focus: An Interdisciplinary Violence Prevention Approach for California was held in March 1997. Facilitated by Prothrow-Stith and Cohen, the symposium brought together leaders from the Attorney General's Office, the Department of Health Services, and the State of California Department of Education. Community-based violence prevention practitioners were included in the forum to ensure that state formulated solutions would also reflect the needs of people working at the local level. The participants agreed that a coordinated, collaborative approach would constitute a more effective strategy, ultimately improving local violence prevention efforts as well as state programs. Not only would programs benefit from each other's expertise, but also they could reduce duplication and they could share data resources and "best practices" information. The Shifting the Focus conference clarified how governmental agencies and organizations with different mandates and perspectives could work together more effectively. From the conference a methodology for collaboration emerged and was published in the paper, Shifting the Focus: An Interdisciplinary Framework for Advancing Violence Prevention.

Since this conference, a group of state leaders has continued to meet, as members of the Shifting the Focus group, to develop additional strategies for fostering interdisciplinary partnerships on the state and local levels. In addition, Shifting the Focus is experiencing an increase in membership and a sense of enthusiasm from agency and department leaders who have expressed their commitment to this effort. Furthermore, members have incorporated a Shifting the Focus methodology into their work in a number of ways. For example:

• RFP approaches have been shared by departments,
• Departments have encouraged localities to use interdisciplinary data, and
• Training (formerly single-discipline in scope and participation) is now multidisciplinary in nature and training invitations go out to teams representing a variety of departments.

Shifting the Focus members are working to maximize the efforts of state programs and funding so that communities can better prevent violence and establish safe and healthy environments.

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