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Discovery
ICP works to uncover the root causes of violence and advance community driven solutions that promote peace. Discovery allows ICP to build its capacity to develop conceptual frameworks, practical strategies and public messages on the critical factors needed to prevent violence and promote peace in our country. Discovery occurs across four domains: community-based demonstration; environmental scans; national convening; and commissioned research.
During community-based demonstration (link to local partners), ICP engages in an interactive process with communities to implement homegrown solutions to violence and build visions for community peace. This includes:
Resident engagement, collaboration and community organizing – These three processes are cornerstones of our work. We believe that residents must be in the forefront of efforts involving their communities and that collaboration is essential for addressing the complex nature of violence. Effective collaboration (link to collaboration CD ROM) must meaningfully engage all community sectors including those most directly affected by violence (victims, witnesses and perpetrators.
Program development, evaluation and sustainability – Organized communities promote collective action for the common good and, in doing so, sustain community health. Healthy communities embrace evaluation and focus on sustainability from the outset. ICP’s work mobilizes and engages a broad range of community members in the development of programs responsive to their needs. We also foster the development of community-based processes that focus on outcomes, critical reflection and continuous improvement. Our sustainability model (link to sustainability CD Rom) is legacy driven and supports a community’s ability to develop alliances, transform community norms and enfold efforts in the breadth and depth needed to sustain successful outcomes.
Community work is guided by knowledge gleaned from national environmental scans (link to environmental scans) of practice and research, national meetings of experts and specially targeted research reports. In this way, ICP adds local context to proven practice and discovers new practices, strategies and lessons for the national field.
Our first discovery project, to prove that violence is preventable by local demonstration (link to local partners), occurred over an eight-year span. Within this demonstration we also explored the need to link community building to violence prevention (link to community building and violence prevention document), the importance of framing media messages for violence prevention (link to Superpredator and Hero documents and Frameworks Institute) and the importance of focusing on sustainability (link to sustainability CD ROM) from the outset.
During this project ICP learned of core competencies communities need to promote peace:
- Engagement and Mobilization
- Collaboration
- Sustainability
- Analysis of the root causes of violence
- Program planning, management and evaluation
- Understanding the relationships among race, power and peace
Communities receive education on these competencies through participation in ICP’s Immersion Training (link to Immersion Training), a national capacity building program.
Adding to best practice in primary violence prevention, ICP also discovered the developmental trajectory that communities experience as they move from crisis in violence to sustained peace. Called the Developmental Stages of Community Peace (link to developmental stages, engaging residents paper), this framework delineates the themes, activities and benchmarks that communities engage as they work long term on the root causes of violence.
ICP continues its discovery process as it examines the relationship among race, power and peace with a focus on research and emerging practice from communities across the country, incorporating both within its developmental stages framework. Three specific projects will shed light on these factors and contribute to the development of an immersion training on race, power and peace:
Structural Violence – a project funded by the Charles Stuart Mott Foundation enabled ICP to conduct a nationwide analysis of community-based efforts focused on violence prevention and ending racial disparities. A paper, Structural Violence, Racial Disparity and the Courage For Peace: Exploring the Intersection of Violence, Race, Power And Peace (link to paper) presents a conceptual framework and call to action.
Healing Racial Wounds – a project funded by the John E. Fetzer Institute will present the thoughts of 100 African Americans with respect to the usefulness of love and forgiveness in healing the country’s racial wounds.
The Practice of Community Peace – funded by an anonymous donor, this project will present findings from interviews with domestic and global violence prevention practitioners examining the extent to which their work reflects the ownership and involvement of those most directly affected by violence and an increasing focus on eliminating the root causes of violence.
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