We’re celebrating the first and most impactful federal initiative to prevent gender-based violence. For nearly two decades, Strategic Prevention Solutions (SPS) has worked alongside the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and statewide domestic violence coalitions to advance the Domestic Violence Prevention Enhancement and Leadership Through Alliances Project (DELTA).
The Landmark Beginnings of DELTA
In 2006, DELTA became the first federal funding focused on preventing intimate partner violence (a type of gender-based violence) before it occurs. It created landmark best practices for community engagement by directly funding communities to craft their prevention programs.
Before DELTA, the vast majority of government funding went to helping people heal after they were harmed. While direct service funding for programs like shelters, advocacy, and counseling are vital and continue today, DELTA marked a decided shift in working toward an end to violence and moving beyond education and into community engagement and health equity to achieve violence-free communities.
Strategic Prevention Solutions: A Partner in Transformative Change
While state domestic violence coalitions and community-based organizations work at creating pro-family workplace policies, affordable housing solutions, and youth leadership councils - SPS staff works behind the scenes to show the impact of their work through evaluation, storytelling and capacity-building.
Lexi Prunella, COO and Evaluation and Planning Director at Strategic Prevention Solutions, said she joined the SPS team because of its involvement in DELTA.
“One of the best things about being a part of this project has been watching the prevention activities evolve across the socio-ecological model,” Prunella said. “When I first started working on DELTA in 2014, people were mostly going into classrooms and teaching healthy relationships and respect - and now ten years later, we’re talking about health equity, we’re talking about systems change, we’re talking about changing policies.”
For the first time, the CDC asked state domestic violence coalitions to think about how they can amplify their reach, and move beyond educating people about the “signs” of intimate partner violence to decreasing community-level factors that lead to violence, like economic stress, poverty, isolation, and traditional gender norms.
That shift from individual to community-level prevention is part of what makes DELTA such a landmark project, and where SPS comes in as an evaluation partner. While state domestic violence coalitions and community-based organizations work at creating pro-family workplace policies, affordable housing solutions, and youth leadership councils - SPS staff works behind the scenes to show the impact of their work through evaluation, storytelling, and capacity building.
SPS President Wendi Siebold shared, “Our involvement with the national DELTA initiative has helped us be a central voice to informing how gender-based violence prevention efforts are planned and evaluated in our country. It has been an honor to work alongside and be a consultant for so many statewide coalitions and local partners working to end gender-based violence.”
Success Stories: DELTA in Action
"One project that comes to mind is Florida,” Prunella said. “We did a wide policy scan with 67 school districts to assess their policies and practices related to addressing teen dating violence."
Throughout the years and iterations of DELTA, SPS has brought its decades of historical knowledge to help state coalitions succeed - helping grantees navigate federal funding applications and reporting, build partnerships, connect with resources, and build their internal capacity to plan and evaluate their prevention strategies.
On the evaluation and data-sharing side of the DELTA puzzle, SPS develops evaluation plans, collects and analyzes data, and creates storytelling assets to share the impact of DELTA work.
"One project that comes to mind is Florida,” Prunella said. “We did a wide policy scan with 67 school districts to assess their policies and practices related to addressing teen dating violence. They also did some incredible work with farmworker communities to build safe workplace policies, including connecting with local businesses to ask how they were supporting their workers and explaining to them how safe workplace policies impact domestic violence and employee safety.”
The Future of DELTA: AHEAD and Beyond
As more states come into the DELTA fold, with CDC’s latest iteration: DELTA AHEAD, SPS staff are excited to see the work continue to evolve.
“I would love to see more cross-collaboration with other organizations who are working on addressing issues impacting violence in their communities, but who may not necessarily identify themselves as working in field prevention,” Prunella said. Breaking down some of these traditional “siloes” across different forms of violence and across different agencies -- and moving toward a shared risk and protective factor approach can help communities better coordinate and leverage resources to streamline and scale up wellness approaches and services.
Join the Movement: Advancing Gender-Based Violence Prevention Together
Whether folks are new to preventing gender-based violence, or have been working in the field for years, SPS is proud to support the ongoing work on community preventionists and state and tribal health departments by offering services such as:
Designing and administering evaluation tools and studies
Writing and consulting on strategic plans and prevention plans for states and coalitions
Training and Capacity Building around primary prevention program planning and evaluation
Data technology innovations to increase access, analysis, and monitoring of state-level and community-level data trends to inform prevention strategies
To learn more about how Strategic Prevention Solutions can advance your prevention work, click here.
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