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.
This report was developed by Prevention Institute for the Movember Foundation to help shape its strategic direction and resource allocation for its mental health focus in the U.S. The report describes the mental health landscape in the U.S. and, in particular, the mental health and wellbeing of boys and men.
Prevention Institute provided consultation to Prevention/Early Intervention grantees in the areas of effectiveness and sustainability and has captured community successes through a series of profiles for the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA).
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.
THRIVE is a tool for assessing the status of community conditions and prioritizing them for action to improve health, safety, and health equity.
This report delineates how the resources of diverse governmental and private institutions can be marshaled to work with communities to make significant progress towards eliminating health disparities in California. It also illuminates the critical pathways that affect health and the key points for intervention to ensure health for all.
This report provides the framework created to promote the emotional, psychological, and physical well-being of San Mateo County. Includes strategies to promote policy and organizational practice changes and interdisciplinary partnerships.
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.
The First Steps report, funded by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, and done in collaboration with Action Alliance for Children and Fight Crime: Invest in Kids California, synthesizes a decade's worth of research on violence prevention, and presents best practices, as well as a comprehensive strategy to start effective violence prevention efforts at an early age.
Prevention Institute's Annie Lyles is interviewed on the role of bystanders in preventing violence.
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