Photo by Shane Rounce on Unsplash

Collaboration is essential to violence prevention because the policies, practices, and conditions that lead to racial justice and safety--or to racial inequities and violence--are shaped by multiple sectors and systems. Taking the time to cultivate transformational, multisector partnerships that are grounded in community priorities and context can amplify collective power and actions that disrupt patterns of inequity and violence. The most effective collaborative efforts include leadership from communities and populations that are most directly impacted by violence and structural racism (e.g. communities of color, LGBTQIA+ individuals, young people, and others with life experience of violence) at every stage of the planning, implementation, and evaluation process. Community members and community-based organizations play unique and critical roles as leaders who can organize, facilitate, and demand change in a way that can be difficult for government entities to do.  The public health sector is often well positioned to serve as a partnership convener by engaging and bringing together other local government entities, community members and community-based organizations, and other sectors to work toward shared actions.

Spotlights

• A New Deal for Youth offers 6 key strategies on how to authentically engage with youth during the policy development process.

   

  1. Build trust
  2. Provide education and resources
  3. Ask good questions
  4. Treat youth as experts
  5. Connect with youth from different backgrounds
  6. Don’t tokenize

For additional details and quotes from New Deal for Youth changemakers, review this 6/30/23 A New Deal for Youth Instagram post.

• The Community Safety Working Group includes civil rights, public health, racial justice, housing, violence prevention, economic justice, and allied organizations nationwide working collectively to advance a vision of community safety that invests in people and communities.
• Safety Through Connections (STC) sustains and grows collaborative community-driven, place-based, culture and systems change for health equity, safe relationships, and the prevention of domestic violence (also referred to as intimate partner violence, relationship violence, and other terms).In Walking in balance with all our relations: Leadership from and partnerships with Indigenous communities to end gender-based violence and restore wellbeing, STC collaborative The Center at McKinleyville shares their work to eliminate interpersonal violence in tribal, intertribal, or multicultural communities. This includes their emerging work to promote racial justice and equitable partnerships with Indigenous communities in Humboldt County, California. 

Additional resources

• The Safe States Alliance's roadmap Strengthening Partnerships between Business and Public Health (link is external) is a tool to advance violence prevention by fostering collaboration between public health and the business sector.
• Prevention Institute’s Collaboration Multiplier is an interactive framework and tool for analyzing collaborative efforts across fields.  Multi-Sector Partnerships for Preventing Violence offers a practical guide for applying the Collaboration Multiplier process to improve community safety outcomes.
• Developed by Big Cities Health Coalition and Prevention Institute, Community Safety Realized is a framework that describes a community-driven, multisector approaches to safety and invites collaboration among community-based organizations, government agencies, policymakers, and other multi-sector partners to promote equity, justice, and safety. Watch the Community Safety Realized webinar recording and download the slides.