Community Vignettes - Lane County Violence Prevention Coalition
Julie Weismann, Executive Director of Hope & Safety Alliance, and Jeff Todahl, Director of Research for the Center for the Prevention of Abuse and Neglect, speaking at United Way’s 2023 Community Breakfast about their participation in the Violence Prevention Coalition.
United Way invests in a wide network of programs – addressing day-to-day needs of families now, and creating coalitions to make upstream impacts on community-wide problems. Through our Community Transformation grants, we are funding four cross-sector collaboratives working to create systemic change to complex challenges faced by kids across Lane County.
One of the coalitions that we are funding during the 2023-26 grant cycle is the Lane County Violence Prevention Coalition.
“We have a broad goal, and that is to reduce the prevalence of violence in Lane County. To do that, we can’t have one program or one approach. This is a multifaceted and community-wide project that is really going to be the project of all our lives.”
Continuing their work from the 2021-2022 Community Change Coalition grant, the Lane County Violence Prevention Coalition (VPC) is working to build and implement a countywide primary violence prevention system. As it stands today, no such system exists, and services largely serve after-the-trauma needs. The Lane County VPC has a broad trauma-informed focus, integrating community efforts around domestic violence, child abuse prevention, sexual assault response, and identity-based violence.
Grant partners in this work include the Hope & Safety Alliance, 90by30 Initiative, Kids FIRST, Sexual Assault Support Services, Siuslaw Outreach Services, and Ophelia’s Place.
Learn more about our current investments on our Community Investments page. You can also learn more about the Violence Prevention Coalition by reading our previous blog, Preventing Violence, Promoting Safety at Community-Scale: Lane County Violence Prevention Coalition.