Dr. David von Schlichten is the coordinator of the Gender and Women’s Studies Program at Seton Hill University, the faculty advisor of the Feminist Collective on campus, and serves on the Board of Blackburn Center, a local agency against domestic and sexual violence in Greensburg, PA. According to David, the racial homogeneity (Greensburg, PA is predominantly white, with widespread racism) and socially conservative values that draw heavily on traditional ideas of masculinity contribute to specific community challenges in promoting change. He has found that even getting the community to recognize that gender-based violence is not just a women’s issue has been much needed but difficult.

Founded in 1987, Alcohol Justice is an advocacy agency that organizes with community groups to pass laws that regulate the production, distribution, and sales of alcohol in order to keep communities healthy and safe. Instead of focusing on individual behaviors associated with alcohol, Alcohol Justice promotes evidence-informed public health policies and organizes campaigns with diverse communities against the alcohol industry’s harmful practices.

With deliberate attention to prevention, MOCSA has gone from a focus on counselling, its crisis line, advocacy and education, to also including activities related to community-level prevention.

With a commitment to social change, preventing sexual and domestic violence has been a decade-long priority for the Missouri Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence (MCADSV). To support prevention efforts, MCADSV focuses on building both its internal capacity and the capacity of member agencies.

Men as Peacemakers (MAP) is an organization in Duluth, Minnesota that engages individuals and communities in innovative strategies that promote gender equity and prevent sexual violence. Men As Peacemakers strategically plans each of its programs to shape social environments for prevention by not only strengthening individual knowledge and skills or promoting community education, but also educating providers and changing organizational practices and policies.

The Sexual Violence Prevention Program (SVPP) at the Minnesota Department of Health has spent many years engaging partners to make prevention a priority with a focus on broad impact strategies and solutions. PI’s Spectrum of Prevention has been a guiding tool that has helped demonstrate the importance of synergy across multiple levels of prevention practice, while highlighting opportunities for broad impact by influencing policy and legislation, changing organizational practices, and fostering coalitions and networks.