About Us

Welcome to Transforming Communities Technical Assistance, Training and Resource Center (TC-TAT), a non-profit organization that works to prevent domestic violence by providing specialized technical assistance, training, and resources. We're based in San Rafael, California.

Our Vision:
Social norms that promote safety, justice, and equality for all people.

Our Mission:
TC-TAT provides a learning environment for the advancement of new thinking, practices, and strategies aimed at transforming violence against women social belief systems and practices to promote safety, justice, and equality. Rooted and informed by the authentic voices and needs of diverse constituents, our prevention agenda and approach are responsive, inclusive, evolutionary, and transformative.

Our Theory of Change:
As TC-TAT builds the leadership and capacity of locally-based individuals and organizations through our learning center, they will produce models of prevention that are comprehensive, coordinated, constituent-driven, and culturally appropriate; inform and strengthen the statewide and national VAW prevention movement; and help to transform social norms, policies, programs, and practices to support safety, justice, equality for all people.

We believe that the best way to support communities and create long-lasting social and institutional changes is by working on multiple levels (individual, relationship, community, societal) to strengthen and expand a broad and sustainable social movement to address and prevent violence against women (VAW).

Our long-term goal is to see increasing numbers of effective, coordinated and sustainable community prevention initiatives that are constituent-driven, culturally appropriate, and integrated into community systems.

Our Values and Beliefs:
Our programmatic strategies and organizational structure are based on the following principles:

• Our strategies must reflect the values of safety, justice, and equality for all women in our communities.
• We believe that building individual awareness of and accountability for the full spectrum of abuse and violence is critical to the prevention agenda. We need to mobilize individuals to transform this awareness and take action and tangible steps toward prevention.
• We are building a broad-based social movement to challenge and transform norms, values, and conditions that contribute to VAW. We nurture this movement at the ground level within individual communities as well as through regional, state, and national networks.
• We foster “community specific” approaches and believe each community is the owner of its prevention agenda. Our strategies our rooted in a perspective of cultural competence and inclusiveness and reflect the needs, values, cultural, ethnic, faith and other unique attributes of each community.
• We are a learning center for the prevention field and equip communities and organizations with products, tools, resources, best practices to support their prevention work.
• We believe it is important to create peer environments- communities of practice - where practitioners can connect, become inspired, share information and build relationships. We offer multiple levels of engagement to strengthen their collective impact.
• We believe in collaborative leadership development and that every individual and organization can be empowered to share a leadership role in preventing VAW and must be supported to find roles that are appropriate to their identity and context.
• We recognize that there are varying degrees of organizational and community readiness to engage in prevention work. Each organization will undergo its own transformation process and will need capacity building support as it implements prevention strategies.
• We must develop, document, and build our evidence base to measure the effectiveness of our prevention programs and sustain the impact of our work.