DELTA FOCUS Innovation Stories Available Now

What are the valuable lessons learned from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s DELTA FOCUS recipients? Innovation stories published on the National Resource Center on Domestic Violence’s PreventIPV narrate the success of various DELTA FOCUS projects in preventing intimate partner violence and provide guidance and inspiration for those currently working to prevent intimate partner violence.

The first three of seven stories are available online now. Each of the stories describes approaches, activities, and key lessons from the project. The four upcoming story topics include trauma-informed community building, creating safe spaces through place-based prevention approaches, building partnerships to address social determinants of health and promote health equity, and multi-level and comprehensive approaches to school-based prevention.

The youth engagement story highlights how community coalitions in California, Alaska, Rhode Island, and Ohio fostered adult and youth mentoring, developed youth leadership, and gave youth an opportunity to lead media and marketing campaigns. The engaging boys and men story explores how Alaska, Ohio, and Rhode Island engaged men and boys throughout their states through social media campaigns, support groups, retreats and summits, providing skill-building workshops, and creating a learning and networking exchange for changing social norms within a person’s sphere of influence. The policy-based approaches story shows how California, Florida, and North Carolina leveraged their DELTA FOCUS funding to develop and disseminate policy resources on teen dating violence, bullying, and model campus policies, and to assist local domestic violence agencies in changing school policies to protect against teen dating violence.

Learning from others’ successes and lessons learned holds immense value in advancing prevention. Knowing what works and what doesn’t, and knowing a story beyond evaluation numbers, is critical to ensuring prevention approaches and programs can be replicated and scaled up. Learning from peers in the movement helps build collective capacity to advance prevention and can inspire action in new spaces. As more of the DELTA FOCUS stories are published, intimate partner violence prevention practitioners will have more examples of the what, how, and why of effective primary prevention to share within their communities to foster buy-in and build momentum for prevention.

Read the youth engagement story here to learn more about ways to authentically engage and foster leadership skills with youth. Read the engaging boys and men story here to learn more about recruiting male allies with community connections and evaluating new approaches. Read the policy-based approaches story here to learn more about opportunities and challenges to policy-based approaches and how additional support and multisector partners strengthen success of these approaches. Check PreventIPV for updates as new DELTA FOCUS innovation stories become available.