Organization:Prevention Institute

From HandWiki

Prevention Institute[1] is a national nonprofit with offices in Oakland, Los Angeles, Houston, and Washington, D.C. Its mission is to build prevention and health equity into key policies and actions at the federal, state, local, and organizational level to ensure that the places where all people live, work, play and learn to foster health, safety and wellbeing. Since 1997, Prevention Institute has partnered with communities, local government entities, foundations, multiple sectors, and public health agencies to bring cutting-edge research, practice, strategy, and analysis to the pressing health and safety concerns of the day.

Work and approach

Prevention Institute champions community-level prevention and health equity approaches to achieving health, safety, and wellbeing. It has applied this approach in support of a variety of public health issues, including violence prevention, mental wellbeing, healthy food and activity environments, and the opioid epidemic, among others.

The organization is best known for two tools it developed:

THRIVE: Prevention Institute developed and piloted a groundbreaking community resilience assessment tool for the US Office of Minority Health. The Tool for Health and Resilience in Vulnerable Environments (THRIVE) helps communities understand how structural drivers, such as racism, unfold at the local level. Since PI introduced THRIVE in 2002, communities and organizations across the country have used it to assess and take action on the community determinants of health and health equity. PI has also supported the development of the health equity field by collaborating with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on a practitioner’s guide for advancing health equity. For the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, we also developed a systems framework to explain the creation of health inequities and how to achieve a culture of health equity.

Adverse Community Experiences and Resilience (ACE|R) Framework: The predominant approach to dealing with trauma in the US is through the expansion of mental health services and the adoption of trauma-informed care, both of which focus largely on individuals. PI’s contribution to the field has been to explain the need to understand trauma at the population level. Our Adverse Community Experiences and Resilience Framework is the first of its kind to advance an understanding of community trauma and what to do about it. Since PI released the framework in 2016, it has been implemented in communities throughout the country and incorporated into efforts to address violence, mental health and wellbeing, opioid misuse, Adverse Childhood Experiences, and climate resilience.

Prevention Institute's Executive Director is Rachel Davis, MSW.

References

As of this edit, this article uses content from "Prevention Institute", which is licensed in a way that permits reuse under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, but not under the GFDL. All relevant terms must be followed.