Community Violence Intervention Center
Report date
February 2018
What has been most instrumental to your progress?
Listening sessions (22 session with 154 people from many backgrounds) provided feedback that helped to illuminate our next steps during the grant and beyond. First, we realized the complexity of our Safer Tomorrows Road Map (STR) and the need to boil it down into more easily understood components that also educated on childhood trauma. We are so excited about the product that was born from this process: an animated 90-second video that we will display on our website and use in many other ways. (See video storyboard uploaded in the financial section; development will be completed soon.) Second, feedback from participants suggested we tailor our message to different groups to increase understanding of the issues. We then conducted a social media campaign educating young adults about trauma and the STR, reaching individuals over 13,600 times in a month; one Facebook video clip had 3,289 views. We will continue to provide basic educational messages that are relatable to different target populations. Finally, the listening sessions truly encouraged us: community members were inspired by the STR and its vision, offering hope and a proactive strategy to end violence.
We took steps toward making our plan a reality. We developed specific goals toward reaching our tipping point in 2025 when we believe violence will begin to decrease, such as the specific services and positions that will be needed until that time to reach all those in need of safety and healing services and to continue healthy relationship education across the entire county. We also attained our safety goal of building and opening a new shelter; without it, we would see skyrocketing rates of injury and compounding effects of trauma among generations. To attain our goal of reaching more traumatized children and adults, we brought in training on an evidence-based therapy for 15 local therapists (5 funded by Bush), of which 93% received certification and have agreed to provide some services at reduced fees to low-income clients, and we made great progress toward initiating third-party pay for clients who can safely use their insurance (to sustain therapy services). Finally, we fortified relationships and a common vision with our school partners that implement evidence-based education to K-12 students to promote healthy relationships and prevent violence (see more below).
One of our most instrumental accomplishments was obtaining community investment in the STR. Not only are community members engaged and excited about our vision, but they are supporting our efforts financially and through helping us to make connections with others. With a $3 million grant from the Engelstad Family Foundation in late December, we have now raised more than $4 million toward ending local violence! Further, the ELM Family Foundation has introduced us and our project to other regional foundations, we have had an opportunity to present to the president of the Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies, and we are continuing to give presentations to community members, using video, PowerPoint and staff involvement providing an overview and details of the STR. The local hospital CEO spoke at almost every presentation, sharing his belief in our plan and the hospital’s major investment, lending even more credibility to our efforts. We are grateful to the Bush Foundation for providing the support for our staff to make this happen and for paving the way to raising the support needed to implement this plan over the next decade and beyond.
Key lessons learned
We failed to engage culturally diverse populations in our STR and realized how we must change in order to do that. Though we have built partnerships with diverse populations over the years, we still structured our ideas for gaining their feedback in a very white-centric way (through listening sessions); the challenges highlighted for us that we need to step back and just learn about the cultures we want to reach, to be present with them without asking for anything in return (such as their feedback). Toward that end, we secured a grant to hire a staff person to work with LGBTQ groups at UND to gain insight into how the dynamics of domestic/sexual violence impact them; we will use the information we learn to ensure our STR addresses every aspect of violence. We took advantage of training opportunities, including a seminar called Living through Grieving: A Native perspective on cutting, as well as a training on Muslim culture and effective outreach, and provided educational sessions about CVIC services and an overview about violence in relationships to New Americans. We are taking steps to open the door to increased involvement that we will explore in the coming months.
We learned how important close communication is with our STR partners (as in any relationship), especially during transition times. After federal funding ended in 2016, the position that oversaw our school efforts also ended and, while we had commitments from our school partners to continue the healthy relationship education at every developmental level, we did not have the resources to stay on top of data and outcomes as closely as we had in the past. We thus hit some barriers when we began to assess progress in 2017, slowing our continued implementation and outcome measurements. We definitely found a way through that challenge and are grateful to the commitment of administration, counselors, educators and others at the schools to re-engage and continue our work toward our common vision of ending local violence. Through the STR investments, we now have hired a school liaison (a former associate principal) to oversee our school efforts and continue to build relationships. Further, some of the survey processes and questions changed, and we are now assessing how we can continue comparative data and outcomes to measure change over time.
Many of the ideas to refine our STR came from our collaborative partners and supporters, who already understand our issues and vision. General community members, on the other hand, had positive reactions to our message and plan, but weren’t equipped to provide feedback for refinement, sometimes giving us the “deer in the headlights” look when we asked them for advice. We realized that we needed to back up and initiate an awareness campaign that addresses our STR but at a more basic level. As mentioned, we are developing an animated video that explains childhood trauma and the STR, we conducted a social messaging campaign for young adults, and we will continue to develop simple messages targeted to specific populations. We also learned that, while the data and research findings are important, we must make our vision come alive through sharing client experiences so people can engage emotionally and relate to our plan. Thus, we added a poignant video clip about a boy raised in a violent home, artwork depicting the fears and experiences of children served by CVIC, and client stories. Participants commented that these steps brought our message home.
Reflections on the community innovation process
The element of inclusivity was critically important. To truly end violence, we must invest in models of change that address our underlying acceptance of violence as a culture; thus, our model must be representative of all sectors of the community. We know we have further work to do in this area. In addition, we realized how important it is to actually BEGIN to test and implement solutions. You can spend a long time building awareness and generating ideas, but at some point, you have to jump in the water and TRY something. We are actively in the middle of truly trying to end violence in 2 generations – it’s bold, it’s risky to say out loud, but we are going for it. With the recent STR investments, we are working on a plan to hire new therapists to reach all 1,700 kids severely traumatized by violence, we are providing education in every school and working on measuring our impact, and we finished our capital campaign and our shelter is operating beautifully. At some point, you have to stop dreaming about a big idea and DO it – with a commitment to continually returning to other stages in the process to refine and ensure continued community ownership of the problem.
Progress toward an innovation
As we received input on refining our plan, we developed a short-term strategy, breaking out annual milestones over the next decade and identifying a “tipping point” at which we believe violence will begin to decrease. This provided crucial details regarding what will be required for implementation, such as the number of staff needed to carry out goals in safety, healing and prevention education; we then had clarity about the resources needed and were able to demonstrate to investors the dollar amount needed to implement the plan, already raising $4 million – allowing us to move forward with implementation and testing. We also then could institutionalize this information into a services operational plan, identifying and tracking the number of people we serve each year toward our goals. Progress reports are provided three times a year to staff and board to keep our innovation at the forefront of our efforts. Recent outcomes from youth surveys show continued progress of 30% decreases in dating and sexual violence, a result of equipping children with healthy relationship education at every developmental level to prevent the use of violence at every stage of life.
What it will take to reach an innovation?
We believe we did achieve an innovation that we are in the process of implementing. We engaged many sectors of the community (with more to come), are beginning to overcome obstacles to tracking outcomes with our school prevention efforts through re-engaging our partners and hiring a school liaison, and realize our innovation is not “done” – we are committed to circling back and refining at every level as we move forward.
What's next?
We have detailed plans for continuing the STR. We have identified and are on schedule to hire the staff needed to increase our safety, healing and prevention education efforts over the next five years; our master plan includes the infrastructure needed to support the new staff. We have reached out to the Kaiser Institute to help us take our fundraising efforts to the next level, with the goal of engaging donors on a national level who are interested in investing in innovations to assure we can continue with the bold vision of virtually ending violence in two generations.
If you could do it all over again...
As mentioned above, we wish we could go back to the start of the grant period with the knowledge we have now about engaging culturally diverse populations – including the knowledge that we have more to learn. We are so excited about our STR, but it won’t truly be complete until it tells the story of every person in our community.
One last thought
The year 2017 was incredibly difficult for us at CVIC. With major budget shortages, we had to exert perhaps more energy than we had to give in order to keep the STR alive, all the while we patched together our budget, laid off staff and cut salaries, dealt with staff morale issues over these changes, and ensured that our regular services continued. We are happy that 2017 is behind us, and that 2018 looks hopeful and promising. With the amazing community investment in our STR, we are full of energy and passion to keep the momentum going and to make this vision a reality in our community!