Collective Power: A Practical Blueprint for Sexual Assault Programs to Create Community Partnerships and Collaborations
Community organizing and fostering partnerships with sectors and agencies beyond our anti-sexual violence movement is a familiar practice for rape crisis centers. There have been decades and generations of community organizing and solidarity led by movement leaders, with complex interventions made by Black, brown, and indigenous movement makers whose wisdom and legacy inspire us.
In order to expand our local sexual assault response efforts, this blueprint provides a nonprescriptive roadmap to how we can build collaborative relationships with community partners within and outside the anti-sexual violence movement. It identifies best practices, models, and resources for creating, encouraging, and preserving community collaborations both in conventional and innovative ways, hence strengthening the capacity of our sexual assault programs and bridging the gaps with other social service organizations and institutions.
The purpose of this Community Blueprint is to offer sexual assault programs a framework for thinking about how we can work most effectively with community partners in both traditional and inventive ways. It is not a prescription for how to do the work – you are the expert on your own agency and your own community. Rather, this blueprint offers a series of considerations and questions to reimagine your work as essential to your community’s needs. To support these efforts, the blueprint provides a compilation of resources and activities along with practical tools. This includes goals, action steps, and sector-specific resources.
Sexual assault programs should use this blueprint as a framework for thinking about how we can work most effectively with community partners in both traditional and inventive ways. Access in English and Spanish from ValorUS’s website.
