Re(en)visioning Public Health Tools for Violence Prevention
Audience: public health professionals, anti-violence practitioners, primary preventionists
In the work of preventing sexual and intimate partner violence, our tools matter—not just for planning and evaluation, but for shaping whose voices count, whose safety is prioritized, and what futures we believe are possible.
Preventionists are always working under enormous pressure without much support, but something is different. We’re enduring political attacks on words, programs are shuttering, funding for prevention has been revoked or slashed (again). Our field faces mounting demands to “prove” our worth. It feels like we have no choice but to go backwards and root down into traditional practices that never worked for all communities.
Preventionists are disempowered, our innovation is stifled, and the practices we have worked so hard to create and share have systematically disappeared from websites, youtube channels, and podcast player apps. Being silenced by beloved partners based on the political whims of people who are afraid of our power hurts, and it is exhausting. We are unwillingly and preemptively participating in this erasure and silencing.
Unwilling complicity is still complicity and that hurts, too. It hurts us all. I am not telling you anything you don’t already know.
We need new ways of engaging in our work.
I’ve created a series of reimagined resources for professionals in violence prevention. These tools keep the best of what we already know, while centering disability justice, community leadership, and the pursuit of lasting impact. They offer a way to navigate our current context without losing sight of our values or communities.
Disability Justice Tools for Change
The first, Planning for Change: Mapping Strategies, Outcomes, and Impact Across the SEM, offers a different approach to the Social Ecological Model. Instead of starting with individuals and working outward, this “backwards SEM” begins where the most power resides—laws, policies, cultural norms—and then traces their effects down to communities, organizations, relationships, and individuals. When preventionists shift practices to map their strategies for impact, identify gaps, and design plans that connect across all levels, we build stronger programs and create pathways to sustainable change, even when the political climate is hostile.
The second, The (Whose Logic Is It Anyway?) Logic Model, urges us to see logic models not as neutral templates, but as living documents shaped by values, assumptions, and power dynamics. By weaving in a disability justice lens, this tool transforms planning and evaluation into a relational process—one that shares power, invites co-creation with disabled community members, and produces strategies that include community needs and priorities. It’s a reminder that we can meet funder requirements while still centering the communities we serve.
Both resources invite preventionists to slow down, ask questions, and design strategies that move from outputs to outcomes, from outcomes to impact, and from impact to liberation. We can protect innovation, sustain equity-focused strategies, and push back against the erosion of the power of our work.
I created these guides for you to use, adapt, and share. They meet the realities we navigate every day—tight timelines, shifting priorities, lack of support, and the urgency to make change now—while keeping sight of the long-term vision: communities where safety, inclusion, and justice are not optional, but essential.
Cierra Olivia Thomas Williams, M.A.
Founder
Nothing Without Us Collective