Program Components:

TRANSFORMING COMMUNITIES:
COMMUNITY ACTION FOR SAFETY AND JUSTICE
Since 1992 this project has mobilized community members to take action for the creation of safety and justice for women and girls. Volunteer "Community Action Teams" (CATs), with the assistance of paid organizers, plan and implement specific prevention campaigns. Campaigns have focused on building community support for holding batterers accountable; building capacity for violence prevention among residents of a low-income housing complex; developing youth leadership on the issue; addressing media images and developing new media images, including a new teen-authored film abuse: NO WAY!

TC's flagship project is the Novato project, a five-year demonstration project in Novato, CA, a city of 50,000 residents. This project unites multi-level efforts across all strata of the community to move Novato residents' knowledge, attitudes, beliefs and behaviors away from failing to challenge violence against women and girls, and into greater alignment with an agenda to hold violent men and institutions accountable. By fostering this shift in norms and by increasing the Novato community's willingness to take action to prevent abuse, TC effectively promotes safety, justice and equality for women and girls.

Transforming Communities in Novato supports and provides leadership for a wide range of community actions on the issue of violence against women and girls. These actions include: campaigns for the retraction of offensive advertising; a monthly newspaper column; assisting the Novato Police Department in reviewing and improving their domestic violence policies and staffing; providing training and leadership for the School District's Diversity Committee; mobilizing a community response to hate crimes; supporting a Teen CAT (Community Action Team) whose members carry out a teen peer education project and host a weekly internet "chat room" theinsite.org for discussion and problem-solving around relationship issues.

The Novato project also constitutes a real-world laboratory to methodically evaluate a community-based prevention program. This research is guided by an internationally-recognized committee of researchers in the domestic violence field. Focus groups, ethnographic techniques, and survey research methods are being employed to gauge the impact of the community-based organizing initiatives on the community's social norms. The Novato project is featured in the National Resource Center on Domestic Violence series on promising practices in the domestic violence field.

TRANSFORMING COMMUNITIES: TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE AND TRAINING
Founded in 1997, this technical assistance program works with domestic violence organizations and allied agencies to promote effective strategies to create safety and justice in diverse communities. The Transforming Communities training curriculum builds on the successful strategies carried out in TC projects, and incorporates research from the violence prevention and social movement fields. To date, twenty-five organizations have participated in the intensive Transforming Communities Institutes, received follow up technical assistance, and committed to implementing at least one community-mobilization strategy.

TRANSFORMING COMMUNITIES: RESOURCE CENTER
To provide state-of-the-art tools for effective prevention of violence against women and girls to domestic violence and other allied organizations, TC founded the Resource Center and Clearinghouse in 1998. The Resource Center currently offers a selection of original publications, including the TC Organizing Kit, the video Beyond Awareness to Action: Ending Abuse of Women, the manual How to Facilitate Community Action Teams, posters, tee shirts, and other collateral items. TC publishes a semi-annual newsletter, Catalyst, for the California domestic violence movement.

The Resource Center is in the process of conducting a strengths-based assessment of prevention materials nationwide, and will promote a selection of those materials found to be especially effective for primary prevention efforts. In addition, the TC Resource Center will develop new materials (educational materials, curricula, social marketing items, reviews of best practices, and informational pieces to support sound theory and practice) to fill gaps identified in the prevention literature through the strengths-based assessment.

COMMUNITY ORIENTED POLICING SERVICES (COPS):
COPS is a community policing partnership which began in 1997 with the Marin County Sheriff's Office and is expanding to include other law enforcement agencies in the country. Through COPS, TC has established a county-wide agenda for the "co-production of safety," by involving criminal justice agencies, graduates of MAWS' Men's program and community groups in the work to end domestic violence. COPS strategies include the collaborative development of protocols, training for law enforcement agencies, CURB, a point - of - booking,intervention for men arrested for domestic violece and community outreach and mobilization ( especially in populations at high risk of arrest). The COPS program currently participates in a national initiative to develop the communty policing apporch to domestic violence. For more information on COPS, see the MAWS Web Site.

MEN STOPPING MEN'S VIOLENCE:
The work of the staff and volunteers of the Men's Program of Marin Abused Women's Services, as well as the COPS project also carry out the work of transforming our communiies, through actively engaging former batterers in advocacy. Male participation in TC and more broadly in the movement to stop violence against women supports the individual transformation of abusers into allies, and also underpins a social norm shift from violence against women as a "women's issue" into one that the community as a whole can own. Currently, male volunteers participate in four program areas: a 24-hour regional hotline to support men to not be violent to their partners (receiving approximately 1500 calls annually); community education; design and implementation of new strategies to reach and involve men in violence prevention; and the CURB intervention -- Community Unit Responding to Batterers. The CURB intervention, designed by graduates of the Men's Program and the COPS Project, engages former male batterers to directly approach men under arrest for domestic violence charges. Male volunteers, graduates of the Men's Program, are on call with the Sheriff's department to meet with an arrested batterer within hours of his arrest. In these meetings, the arrested man is spoken to about being accountable for his violence and urged to comply with any restraining orders. He is also given the times and locations of classes and encouraged to enroll in the Men's Program . Since 1998, 184 CURB interventions have been completed.