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.
Building on our experiences working with community advocates and lessons learned supporting communities of practice, including Making Connections and Communities of Care, PI is partnering with the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health to provide support and resources to social justice advocates leading work to change community conditions impacting health, safety, and equity, especially as it impacts children, young people and their families.
Prevention Institute worked with CDC’s Division of Violence Prevention on Uplifting Contextual and Experiential Evidence (UCEE) to illustrate the value and importance of contextual and experiential evidence alongside best available research evidence.
Prevention Institute’s staff participated on multiple advisory committees and working groups at the local, state, and national levels. In these roles, our staff provided guidance across topics like health equity, mental health, and community violence prevention to various national nonprofits, state governments, and policy advocacy groups. Through this work, we help to advance policy and systems change that is rooted in health equity and prevention.
Such groups include:
Prevention Institute staff shared our work and approach with practitioner audiences at conferences and webinars, including the Association of Black Foundation Executives Annual Conference, the National Association of County and City Health Officials Annual Meeting, and with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. PI also hosted a virtual teach-in, which launched PI’s new tool, The Timeline of Resistance.
In 2024, Prevention Institute further grounded our efforts in an affirmative long-term vision of the world we want to inhabit and strengthened our capacity to develop policy and narrative strategies that ask for what communities want and deserve.
COVID-19 has disproportionately harmed people of color and communities with lower income with regard to employment, worker protections, and social isolation. Given the adverse impacts that COVID-19 has had on residents across the state including loss of income, increased social isolation, and potential displacement, California has an opportunity to recognize the pandemic as a wake-up call.
Since 2010, the Hogg Foundation has hosted a free biennial conference in Houston focusing on children’s mental health topics. From October 21 and October 23, 2021, Prevention Insitute and the Hogg Foundation hosted The Young Minds Matter 2021 Virtual Conference Series.
Prevention Institute is researching and planning how to integrate intergenerational partnerships into our health equity efforts. For example, we are collaborating with community-based partners to position young leaders as subject matter experts at national conferences. This improves our work, honors young people’s wisdom, and strengthens the health equity field. We will continue to post new projects to this page as they develop.
The Making Connections Backpack is a resource library for those engaged in building a gendered and community-level approach to improving mental wellbeing among men and boys. It offers tools to shape your journey, and connect with others engaged in or supporting similar upstream prevention work.
Through a cooperative agreement with the CDC, PI has partnered with RTI International and CLASP to update the technical package content and develop modules that provide a foundation for activities during periods of infrastructure disruption.
Join us in advancing health equity and community empowerment — get in touch today to support the Prevention Institute’s efforts.