Principles
Transforming Communities provides a learning environment for the advancement of new thinking, practices, and strategies aimed at transforming existing social belief systems and practices so that violence, abuse, and intimidation of women and girls will cease to exist. Currently under way several projects, all in varying stages of development, implementation, and testing, that have begun to incorporate the following basic operating principles into practice.

1. Strategies must reflect the values of safety, equality, and justice for women and girls. They must promote women's personal safety as a matter of public safety and as a basis for men's relationships to women.

 

2. Community intervention and organizing strategies must be designed and implemented by the residents of each community. In order to be effective, strategies must reflect the needs, values, and cultural and ethnic composition of each community.

 

3. Strategies are aimed at reaching an ever-expanding number of diverse individuals to build a broad-based social movement that will challenge existing personal and social understandings and beliefs about relationships, the spectrum of violence and abusive behaviors, and women's and girls' individual human rights.

 

4. Strategies have been designed that (a) seek to create formal and informal sanctions that hold men accountable for the full spectrum of their abuse and violence, (b) build men's awareness of and accountability for stopping their own beliefs and attitudes that support these behaviors, and (c) encourage men to become advocates to other men to do the same.

 

5. Women and men interested in the community organizing work of the project shall receive training so that all participants learn to relate to and interact with each other based on the values of safety, equality, and respect.

 

6. Problematic institutional practices such as ineffective criminal justice responses are directly addressed and, as needed, confronted and challenged by community members rather than by project staff.

 

7. Changes in attitudes, beliefs, and practices with regard to men's violence toward women will be measured through a research and evaluation component in order to validate the effectiveness of the project's community-organizing methods, so that communities around the country can be confident in adopting similar strategies.

 

8. New thinking and learning shall be incorporated into strategies along the way from the actual experience of conducting the work and from other disciplines working to advance social transformation.

The TC Vision

In summary, Transforming Communities holds a vision that the epidemic of men's violence in general and specifically against women and girls can function as a catalyst for broad-based community and political action, which, by acknowledging and addressing the root cause of men's violence, works to create a socially just society. To that end, success and advancement toward this change shall be celebrated every step along the way. It is hoped that other communities around the country will be encouraged by Transforming Communities' success record to implement similar strategies in order to support an ever-expanding national movement to eradicate violence against women and girls.