Ending Domestic Violence Creating Social Change
About Us
Mission: We are committed to facilitating and advocating for
social change to prevent intimate partner violence by addressing all
forms of oppression within our community and facilitating healthy relationship
skills on an interpersonal, peer, professional and community level.
Vision: We will promote awareness, build skills and disseminate tools which will identify and address ways to create a just, equitable and safe community. This includes addressing all forms of oppression that support and working for healthy relationships in all aspects of our lives. We will be guided by evidenced based practice including research, history, personal experience of participants and collective global voices. We will facilitate social change by being committed to educating ourselves and our community.
Core Principles:
*Create social change and social justice
* Acknowledge and understand privilege
* Acknowledge and understand the intersectionality of oppressions
* Learn from history
* Be Community based, community oriented, and prevention focused
* Use Democratic participatory process
* Ensure and engage in nonjudgmental listening
* Value education, especially popular education
* Find and become allies
* Constantly evaluate and use evidence-based practice
* Engage in self-criticism and criticism
* Understand that the personal is political and value the wisdom of
the variety of personal experience
* Promote growth on an individual, relationship, community, and societal
level
* Be informed and held accountable by people of color, LGBTQI people,
differently abled people, and youth
* View our work as part of a movement and collaborate with other groups
working for social change on a variety of issues
* Work under the framework of: Respect, Honesty, Empowerment, Communication,
Liberation and Solidarity
For more information about how our program is structured, look at the following pdf documents: Process Chart, and Social Ecological Model.
History
Peaceful Paths' Violence Prevention Program started with The DELTA Project (Domestic Violence Prevention Enhancement and Leadership through Alliances) in 2003 and has been going strong ever since.
The Florida Coalition Against Domestic Violence (FCADV), along with 13 other domestic violence state coalitions, was funded by the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) to begin the DELTA project.
There are six DELTA sites in Florida including Fort Walton Beach, Pinellas County, West Palm Beach, Orlando, Gainesville and Pasco County. Each of these projects is working with a different population ranging from faith-based communities to schools.
The DELTA projects have used and developed violence prevention agendas and curriculums that are research and theory based in accordance with CDC guidelines.
The Violence Prevention Program currently also receives funding from FCADV through the state of Florida. Florida is the first state to fund primary prevention of intimate partner violence to all (42) of the certified domestic violence centers.
What we do:
The DELTA Project’s main goal is primary prevention. To be primary prevention violence must not have initially occurred. To say that to prevent date rape a woman must watch her drink is actually intervention, not prevention. It is intervention because 1) the rape is assumed to happen so let it happen to the person not watching the drink; 2) there is a rapist with the intent to rape; and 3) only the rapist can stop the rape, not the potential victim.
Primary prevention deals with discovering and then reassessing knowledge, attitudes and beliefs that inadvertently and subtly lead to violence against women. Some of these beliefs can be found in gender roles, language, media, religious/spiritual views and beliefs, educational institutions and even traditional family practices.
Violence in our culture’s language is an easy example. Take for instance, “Rule of thumb,” “Kill two birds with one stone,” “Shoot me an Email,” “Hit like a girl,” “Quit acting like a retard,” That is so gay,” and when describing a person one will mention if that person is of color because being white is the “norm” and it is assumed and never specified. The list goes on and on. The DELTA Project asserts that our language is a key to understanding our culture’s value system.
DELTA projects work toward ending domestic violence by addressing and
working against homophobia, racism and sexism, as these are all forms
of violence that hold one another firmly in place.
We are excited to share this information to a variety of different people
in different locations. Check out some of the conference
presentations we've given.