Prevention Guiding Principles
Prevention is one of CARE’s guiding principles. CARE’s Prevention Education team seeks to deepen and build upon CARE’s guiding principles through our outreach, workshops, collaborations, and events across campus. Read on to learn more about the Prevention Team’s approach!
Collaborative & Collective Learning
CARE understands that learning occurs not only in the classroom and university but also in the community. We believe that everyone can be both a teacher and a learner. While CARE shares education with the community, we are equally committed to learning from it as well.
Decolonized Perspectives
CARE strives to challenge narratives that exclude the stories and voices of marginalized people, and prioritizes inclusivity and care for all communities. Dismantling white supremacy, individualism, and apathy is important as we move toward collective accountability, empathy, and social justice. What does social justice in your education and daily life mean to you?
Creative & Critical Thinking
CARE seeks to create learning environments that encourage participants to explore new possibilities, see existing situations in a new way, and examine their own role in preventing violence and shifting cultures. When have you explored a new way of thinking about the world around you? How does reflection about oneself or the world feel?
Curiosity – A Learner Perspective
CARE invites folks to approach new ideas with curiosity, passion for learning, and openness to different perspectives. We don’t have to be experts on all facets of a topic to make a difference in the world, and we should always be open to learning more. Even if someone is an expert, there is always the possibility and gift of learning from those they’re serving or with whom they’re interacting. When have you been in the “student” and “educator” positions at the same time? When have you learned while teaching or taught while learning?
Cultural Relevance & Responsiveness
Outreach and prevention efforts must be accessible to community members who bring diverse identities and experiences to a shared learning space. This includes recognizing that everyone approaches topics related to interpersonal harm from different perspectives, shaped by their unique identities and experiences.
Meeting People Where They Are
Meeting members of the campus community where they are in terms of readiness to discuss interpersonal harm and prevention is a trauma-informed approach, and it is an essential aspect of accessible, shared learning that CARE values. What topics would you like to discuss with your community?
CARE tailors workshops and presentations to the student organizations and campus departments that request our collaboration – reach out and let us know what you’d like to bring to your community! Visit our Workshop Request Form to schedule a presentation.
Cultural Humility Over Cultural Competence
Cultural humility means approaching with a willingness to learn from people and their communities, without making assumptions about what a community wants or needs. 1 CARE takes a person-and-community-centered approach to honor the beliefs, customs, and values that foster multicultural environments. CARE commits to an ongoing process of accountability, self-exploration, self-critique, continual learning, and willingness to learn and adapt, and we encourage our community and workshop participants to engage in these actions too. How have you practiced self-reflection when interacting with people in your community and others?
Value in Lived Experience
Everyone holds a wealth of knowledge and are experts in their own lived experiences. CARE values what others contribute to conversations around preventing interpersonal harm. Our goal is to lend our expertise to situate what community members share within frameworks that help us be on the same page and move forward together. How has sharing your lived experience or hearing others’ lived experiences strengthened your connection to others in learning spaces?
Shared Accountability in Our Community
Everyone is constantly learning and growing, and everyone has the capacity for change. Learning is not always easy, comfortable, linear, or perfect — CARE wants to create learning environments and brave spaces where people can explore and imagine, imperfections and all.
Empathy & Grace
Brave spaces allow participants to explore differing ideas and opinions, own their intentions and impacts, have open dialogues, and engage with respect and choice. What can you learn amongst and from others?
Love Ethic
Embracing a love ethic means valuing relationships and wellbeing, and committing to our community through openness, honesty, respect, and integrity. Love cannot coexist with power imbalances, abuse, or domination. We aim to nurture and care for our community through this ethic. As Bell Hooks demonstrates, there can be no love without justice. Choosing and practicing love means understanding our own identities, cultivating awareness of internalized systems of oppression, decolonizing our minds, and working with ourselves and our communities to confront pain and oppression.2 How do you tangibly practice love for yourself, others, and your community?
Challenging Narratives & the Status Quo
Within the dominant culture, certain systems and ideas allow violence to occur within relationships and institutions. CARE aims to create spaces for folks to challenge “the way it’s always been done,” critically approach harmful or outdated narratives, and move towards more sustainable, beneficial practices and norms. CARE avoids recreating harmful, punitive dynamics in our work. What narratives and norms do you want to challenge, replace, or undo?
Growth
CARE’s prevention work starts from a place of understanding that people’s knowledge, skills, and abilities can grow and develop over time–not only with academic subjects but also in addressing harm and practicing healthy relationships. Through conversations with our community members, we strengthen our skills for making healthier, more empathetic choices in our relationships and connections.
Imagination
Innovation and creativity keep CARE’s outreach and engagement exciting and relevant. We welcome the challenge of using our imaginations to grow our understanding of interpersonal violence and how to prevent it. Prevention work is a space for people with different disciplines and skill sets to come together and create something fresh and relevant for our campus community. What do you think we could do differently in the world? What are you hoping and dreaming for as we create a more survivor-centered, just world?
Hope
CARE centers empowerment as a guiding principle of our work. Part of this includes focusing on opportunities for positive change and healing instead of primarily highlighting deficits and barriers. Programming that focuses on the negatives should end with actionable ways to move forward and realize our collective vision for a better future. What is one positive, accessible action you can take to enact change in our community?
Building Our Support Toolboxes
We hope to foster the development of a growth mindset so folks can feel comfortable in their learning process and understand that we all have the capacity for immense positive personal change.3 In thinking about your current friendships and relationships, how do you want to grow? What skills, behaviors, and habits are you hoping to develop?
Primary Prevention
Primary prevention relies on culture change and the need to shift behaviors and build skills to address the root causes of harm and promote healing. It emphasizes authentic strategies for responding to harm, empowering individuals to develop realistic approaches for building safer, more accountable communities, while recognizing that cultural shifts require time and collective effort.
Culture Change
As participants in a culture—whether in a workplace, a student group, or a friend group—we can shift norms from within the culture by shifting our behaviors and building skills. We cannot only treat the symptoms of a culture that enables harm, but must address the roots and move towards the attitudes, behaviors, and motivations that help us heal and improve. What positive changes have you seen in your community? Who helped those changes manifest, and how did they do it?
Strategies, Not a Manual or Script
Using discussions, hands-on activities, and scenarios, CARE has workshop participants consider how they might respond to and interrupt harm or support survivors in ways that feel authentic and realistic for them. In line with the empowerment model and promoting folks’ self-determination, we don’t tell people what to do—we provide the space to consider what strategies they might use and how to develop skills to build safer, more accountable communities.4 What is the benefit of doing things authentically? What opportunities and challenges come with releasing the pressure of a script or a set way of doing something?
Planting Seeds
Shifting the culture on campus or in society will not happen in one day or after one workshop. However, having a brave conversation, challenging norms, and practicing supporting someone can plant the seed to make the change that ripples and multiplies. No one has to do everything alone, but everyone can and should do something. What seeds of social change do you want to plant and nurture? What do you want to grow during and after your time at UCSC?
Sources
- Fisher-Borne, Cain & Martin, 2014 – Full article: From Mastery to Accountability: Cultural Humility as an Alternative to Cultural Competence ↩︎
- bell hooks, 2006 – “Love as a Practice of Freedom” from Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations ↩︎
- Limeri et al., 2020 – Growing a growth mindset: characterizing how and why undergraduate students’ mindsets change | International Journal of STEM Education ↩︎
- Cattaneo, Lauren & Goodman, Lisa, 2014- What Is Empowerment Anyway? A Model for Domestic Violence Practice, Research, and Evaluation. Psychology of Violence. 5. 84-94. 10.1037/a0035137. Root Cause, 2011- Social Issue Report: Empowering Victims of Domestic Violence ↩︎