Increase Opportunities for Success

Following the steps below can help your violence prevention efforts succeed. As you plan your violence prevention effort, work to include community members and those impacted by violence. For example, including young people with lived experiences of violence can increase opportunities for success. Seeking local partnership while planning can help ensure efforts are community driven and effective at preventing violence.

set yourself up for success

Icon Image of hand and lightbulb titled "Use Data to Understand Assets, Needs, Resource and Context"

Hexagon titled "Develop a Shared Vision"

Hexagon icon titled "Prioritize Risk and Protective Factors"

1. Define the problem

2. Identify Risk and
Protective Factors

3. Develop and test
prevention strategies

4. Assure widespread
adoption

Public health focuses on the health and well-being of populations. It combines knowledge from many disciplines and input from multiple sectors to address health problems like violence. Based in the scientific method, the four-step public health model analyzes data to understand a community’s problems and priorities, identifies risk and protective factors, plans and tests prevention strategies, and ensures widespread adoption of violence prevention programs based on the best available evidence.

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Developing a comprehensive plan before you begin the work should increase your chances of success. This section can help you create a comprehensive or specific plan for implementation and evaluation. Use the tools, resources and tip sheets related to planning anytime during the process.

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Community Planning Tool

WEAVE Toolkit

A public health approach uses data to make decisions and set priorities. Using the best available data can help you understand the problem and determine your approach to addressing violence.

Communities can draw from diverse, local data from multiple sources to help understand violence patterns, the most affected groups and locations, and community conditions.

Different types of community assessments can give a clear picture of a community’s priorities, needs, resources, and groups experiencing more violence than others. Data may come from a range of sources including public meetings, focus groups, surveys, and publicly available data sources.

When available, it is important that local decision making is informed by local data, as even different neighborhoods within a city can experience vastly different conditions and health outcomes.

Remember to include community members with lived experience of violence when you decide which data to use. This includes involving community members when you interpret and present data to provide context and avoid invoking harmful narratives.

Here are some common methods for gathering local data on community needs, assets, resources, and context:

Careful and intentional data use can promote accurate, fair, and positive narratives. Exposing harmful narratives and lifting up transformative narratives that value all people—no matter their race, income, sex, sexual orientation, disability status, or zip code—are important steps toward increasing understanding and preventing violence. To learn more about intentionality throughout the data lifecycle, see principles for using public health data.

Needs Assessment is a process to identify comprehensive information about the community’s current health status, needs and issues. Conducted in collaboration with key partners, it helps identify community priorities. Successful needs assessments strengthen community-based partnerships and foster community engagement by involving the community in the assessment process.

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Asset Mapping identifies assets that improve quality of life in a community. These can help you identify supports, resources, structures, and other strengths. Assets include tangible things such as schools and faith-based institutions, as well as cultural assets like stories, traditions, and relationships that contribute to a community’s identity. This can be particularly important if your organization works with indigenous communities. Assets can often be used to help address needs.

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An Environmental Scan helps examine how the organizational, social, economic, cultural, and political context affects the ability and commitment to address violence. This includes a review of existing policies, practices and programs in the community, including their impact, strengths, and weaknesses. Consider examining how the current strategies and approaches in your community map onto the strategies and approaches in the Resources for Action.

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Capacity Assessments determine whether you and your partners are able to affect various factors for violence and implement certain strategies and approaches.

The findings from these assessments can be used to help communities focus on those with the greatest burden and address the core issues creating the burden. Through this process you have the opportunity to eliminate inequities in risk for violence.

Learn more about all of the community resource assessments described above.

Download the Assessments Tip Sheet

Visit the Division of Violence Prevention’s Capacity Assessment Tool

Visit Resources