Center for Women´s Health and Wellness
Current Research: Women's Leadership Network for Safe, Healthy, and Meaningful Lives
The Women’s Leadership Network to Prevent Domestic Violence is an innovative community-based approach to domestic violence resistance. Its goal is to enhance the capacity of women to create domestic violence resistance strategies tailored to the unique cultural and social needs of their own communities. This approach to domestic violence prevention programming is grounded in the principles of community organizing, community-based participatory research, and best practices in family violence prevention programming.
The program was first implemented in one lower income, African-American neighborhood in the southeastern United States. The qualitative process evaluation indicates that this approach can be successful, but it requires researchers to be patient, “hands-on,” and willing to modify their approach to meet the needs and interests of the community. We are currently working to implement the Network in a second lower income, African-American and Hispanic neighborhood in the southeastern United States.
Program Overview
There are two levels of program activities:
- Level One: The first level involves a leadership training program for a select group of residents. This program aims to equip the participating residents (i.e., the Women’s Leadership Network members) with the knowledge, skills, and self-efficacy needed to develop, plan, implement, and evaluate domestic violence prevention programming within their neighborhood.
- Level Two: The second level involves the Women’s Leadership Network members developing and implementing domestic violence prevention programming within their community. The specific format and content of this programming is determined by the network members during their completion of the leadership training program. This programming focuses on:
- increasing residents’ awareness of the problem of domestic violence
- promoting social norms that favor healthy, nonviolent relationships
- increasing residents’ knowledge of the resources available to help them with problems related to domestic violence
- enhancing the relationships between community residents and local domestic violence-related services and institutions.