Prevention Institute (PI) is a national nonprofit with offices in Oakland, Los Angeles, Houston, and Washington, D.C. Our mission is to build prevention and health equity into key policies and actions at the federal, state, local, and organizational level to ensure that the places where all people live, work, play and learn to foster health, safety and wellbeing. Since 1997, we have partnered with communities, local government entities, foundations, multiple sectors, and public health agencies to bring cutting-edge research, practice, strategy, and analysis to the pressing health and safety concerns of the day. We have applied our approach to injury and violence prevention, healthy eating and active living, land use, health systems transformation, and mental health and wellbeing, among other issues.
Health, safety, and wellbeing
Our vision is that all people experience their full potential for health, safety, and wellbeing across the course of their lives. Health is more than the absence of illness and injury. It is a physical, mental, and spiritual condition that allows people to thrive and live fulfilling lives. Health includes safety—freedom from violence and the threat of violence—and wellbeing, which is reflected in vibrant mental and behavioral health
Equity
Many illnesses and injuries occur in higher frequency and with greater severity in communities that have suffered from decades of underinvestment because of racism, concentrated poverty, and other unjust structures. That’s why PI incorporates the concept of health equity into all our work. To achieve health equity, we support communities in their efforts to reverse policies and practices that have distributed resources unevenly across communities and enact policies and practices that enable all communities the opportunity to be healthy.
Community
PI advocates expanding the approach to health problems beyond a focus solely on individuals to include the sociocultural, economic, and physical environments of the communities in which people live, work, play, and learn. We know how important the community environment is when it comes to health outcomes. For example, parents can’t be expected to keep their children’s asthma controlled if their neighborhood has a high level of air pollution. People need a healthy community environment to be able to be healthy and keep their families healthy.
Upstream Prevention
Prevention Institute asks what can be done in the first place, before people get sick or injured. We always look upstream for solutions and try to address problems as close to their source as possible. The reason we focus on prevention is simple: It reduces needless suffering and saves lives. Time and again, prevention efforts have been proven to work. Just think of the millions of deaths and injuries that have been avoided because of prevention policies like removing smoking from public places and requiring safety features in cars.
Click here to learn about our top accomplishments.
To learn more about us, read our Strategic Framework.
