Mental Health & Wellbeing

Building thriving communities helps foster mental health and wellbeing for everyone. When community members feel connected and have safe places to gather, and when they have access to affordable housing and good jobs, they experience less stress and anxiety. Conversely, exposure to repeated violence, displacement, and other traumas—or Adverse Community Experiences—undermines communities’ and individuals’ wellbeing.

Prevention Institute collaborates with a range of community partners to shift policies, practices, and norms to create conditions that support mental health and resilience. We partner with community-based coalitions to shape strategies that reflect their priorities and draw on their history, culture, strengths, and assets. Transformation may start with creating a safe space for young men at a bike shop, or engaging faith leaders to help de-stigmatize depression, or connecting veterans to ease re-entry to civilian life. These community changes, large and small, along with the collaborations required to make them happen, ultimately strengthen mental health and wellbeing across communities.

Photo credit: Kokua Kalihi Valley/Honoulu Aina
Mental Health & Wellbeing > Content Buckets
Mental Health & Wellbeing > Content Buckets
Mental Health & Wellbeing > Content Buckets
Mental Health & Wellbeing > Content Buckets

The Community-Centered Health Homes Model: Updates & Learnings

The Community-Centered Health Homes Model: Updates & Learnings

The Community-Centered Health Homes model, first presented by Prevention Institute in 2011, provides a concrete framework for healthcare organizations to systematically address the community conditions that impact their patients. It combines years of prevention experience about how to keep people from getting sick or injured, with insight gained from interviewing healthcare organizations around the country who were inspired to improve their patients’ health and the health of the communities around them.

Adverse Community Experiences and Resilience: A Framework for Addressing and Preventing Community Trauma

This first-of-its-kind framework explores trauma at a community level. It explains how trauma is produced not only by experiencing interpersonal violence but also by experiencing structural violence – the harm that individuals, families, and communities experience from the economic and social structure; social institutions; and social relations of power, privilege and inequity that inhibit them from meeting their basic needs.

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Prevention is Primary: Strategies for Community Wellbeing

Co-published by Prevention Institute and Jossey Bass and APHA, Prevention is Primary describes the overarching foundation and principles guiding primary prevention efforts and highlights prevention practice through a range of social and health issues, including chronic disease, HIV, violence, and mental health.

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The Spectrum of Prevention

The Spectrum of Prevention

The Spectrum of Prevention is a systematic tool that promotes a multifaceted range of activities for effective prevention. The Spectrum identifies multiple levels of intervention and helps people move beyond the perception that prevention is merely education and serves as a framework for a more comprehensive understanding of prevention that includes six levels for strategy development.

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