0:00:00.4 Mo Lewis: Welcome to Resource on the Go, a podcast from the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, an understanding, responding to, and preventing sexual abuse and assault. I'm Mo Lewis, the prevention specialist at NSVRC. On today's episode, we're learning more about how prevention staff in New Mexico created a policy scorecard to help evaluate community level prevention.

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0:00:40.5 ML: I am joined today by Jess Clark, the Director of Prevention for the New Mexico Coalition of Sexual Assault Programs. Thanks for being here, Jess.

0:00:49.5 Jess Clark: Thank you so much for having, Mo.

0:00:52.5 ML: We're talking about the policy checklist that you created in partnership with the New Mexico Department of Health, specifically to help evaluate community level prevention. So what program were you trying to evaluate with this? 

0:01:07.4 JC: So me Jess Clark, when I was in middle school, late '90s, elder millennial here, and what was then called the Santa Fe Rape Crisis Center said homophobia is a form of sexual violence, which today not a big deal to say, but in 1990 whatever, very big deal to say. And so they started working on program called GLYPH, Gay Lesbian Youth Preventing Homophobia, that was in the public schools, which was a big deal at the time. They started the first, what was then called, Gay Straight Alliance, now called Genders and Sexualities Alliances and I was one of the young people in that program. And this program being in the public school is a big deal and was going really well.

0:01:51.1 JC: And then Focus on the Family came in from Colorado and they said, "You can't teach your children this." And we said, "These are not your children. Go back to Colorado." But it was like a nine-month school board battle that eventually ended in the program name being changed to Youth Organizing Diversity for All. It was the same program. They just took the word gay out of it, and suddenly it was fine. So fast forward many years later, and then I was the prevention manager at that same agency then called SAS, Sexual Assault Services, and we decided to take that idea that homophobia is a form of sexual violence. And since the time where that idea was first talked about as a whole in the Sexual Violence Prevention Movement field, we now have a better understanding of the roots of sexual violence and rigid gender norm being very much at the core of that.

0:02:44.5 JC: And so we said, okay, well, if rigid gender norms are at the core of sexual violence, what better way to reduce rigid gender norms for everybody than by making our community safer for transgender non-binary people. So we started a program called Beyond Blue and Pink that had a mix of training and technical assistance policy review for any client-serving agency. So that went all the way from pre-K through 12th grade, university to residential services like domestic violence shelter to counseling centers, doctor's offices, basically any place where trans people need to be in order to be well or to gain safety, let's focus there.

0:03:36.0 JC: And the tricky thing about that was I had never done a community level program before that needed evaluation. And so we worked with The New Mexico Department of Health to say, what do we do? How do we do this? I feel like evaluating community level program and is really tricky. So do you evaluate the attitudes and beliefs of the people in the training component? Do you evaluate the actual policy changes? And if you do, what does that look like? So we worked together to create what was originally called an environmental scan, and then really quickly said, no, it's not really an environmental scan, and ended up calling it a policy scan.

0:04:18.5 ML: Yeah, that sounds so cool. I'd love to hear a little bit more about how you worked in partnership with the Department of Health to create this as an evaluation tool you can use.

0:04:28.8 JC: So the first thing I did was go through what are all of the kind of sections or the categories of policies that any kind of agency might need to address. So we broke that down into paperwork as the very first thing because it's also usually the lowest hanging fruit, is if you can just have decent paperwork that ask questions that give clients, students a chance to say who they are and help them understand that you've considered the possibility of their existence, that is a fantastic first step. So starting with paperwork, going into anti-discrimination policies as a whole, and what's included in that, then residential pieces for any residential programs, a piece specifically for schools, and then ending with training and having training be in policy, not just practice. So I came up with all of the sections, came up with some draft questions, went to DOH to try to make sure that the questions were phrased in a way that could make sense to people who don't teach about trans folks for a living, and then created a scoring system.

0:05:41.9 ML: And I know this is something that you're gonna make available for other folks who wanna use it, but I'd love to hear more about how would someone use this in their work.

0:05:52.9 JC: So first, creating a relationship with an agency that you wanna work with, and this one is really specific to serving trans non-binary communities, but I think the style of this policy scan could be adapted to many different things. We also adopted it around child sexual abuse prevention, and a policy scan on that front, I think it could be adopted in lots of different ways. But first creating a relationship with whatever community organization you wanna work with, and then we did the policy scan before doing any training and when I first started doing it, I would send it out to people. It's a Google form 'cause it is easy to do, and lots of folks know how to fill it out now, is I would send it to people and then I would wait for them to send it back, and then we would set up training. That never worked out so well and that I don't know about you, but me, if someone sends something to me for me to fill out in my own time without a clear timeline or a clear guidance or really you say, you have to do this right now, it's gonna just work its way towards the bottom and then the second page of my email, and then once it's on the second page, it's like it doesn't exist.

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0:07:00.9 JC: So I started instead having a meeting with the organization and the primary interested parties within that organization to actually fill out the scan together, and that helped in that any kind of questions they had, I could answer in the moment to help them give their best answers and also it helps to do it with them because I could preface it by saying, your answers here are not going to elicit any kind of judgment from me. These are questions that most agencies just haven't thought about yet.

0:07:36.5 JC: The number one response I got from people was, "Oh, I hadn't thought about that." So if you're feeling any kind of hesitation here, this is not about judgment. It's about helping you grow. And so we would sit down, we would fill out the scan together and I would take notes while we filled out the scan for future technical assistance topics. So we fill out the scan, and then I would have a separate page of notes for any information that would help me give them better TA later. They would get a score at the end each, and they're all multiple choice questions that are scored differently in kind of a range. So for instance, how does the agency's intake paperwork ask about gender? If the only options are sex with options for M or F, that's gonna be scored the lowest, but you could also have gender with options for M or F. Still not great. Slightly better. That's gonna be the second lowest. And then the third one and the gold standard option is a two-part question, sex assigned or designated at birth with options for M, F or X and then a gender with a fill in the blank. I make it really clear to agencies while we're doing it in person or over Zoom that this is only if you have to get that sex assigned designated birth information.

0:09:00.4 JC: So if you don't build insurance, you don't have to get that information. You can just have gender, but it's scored based on worst to best answer, and they get a score at the very end. And of course, we take into account places where questions might not apply to them or whole sections where questions might not apply to them, and they take that end score, we take our TA topics, then we do training for the whole staff. And then I work with whatever decision makers or staff members have been identified to implement the policy, to write and implement the policy, and then they get the policy scan again, usually four to six months later, and we get to see how their score has changed. And that piece was kind of surprising to me and that it ended up being pretty meaningful for folks to be able to say, this is where we were six months ago, this is where we are now, and it was tricky to get there. There was a lot that went into it, but hey, we did it. That's great.

0:10:04.3 ML: This sounds so cool. I love hearing that there is a tool that you have that can give people a score, but also give them specific areas where they can improve and that you've tied it to TA and that you tied it to training so that people are getting the support that they need in terms of being able to make this change. And I'm thinking about how this could be used within a state or a territory if people wanna track that kind of change state-wide, and I'm wondering if you have any ideas about how that could be used.

0:10:36.2 JC: Yeah, and I love that. I think it'd be really interesting to use across New Mexico, especially given the... In New Mexico, and as it is, I'm sure in many other states and territories that are communities very just in some huge ways, depending on where you are in the state. And so I imagine the tool would actually have to be adapted for individual communities and what kind of language they have readiness for because I think one thing that can happen, especially when we're talking about communities that are disproportionately targeted for violence, marginalized communities, whatever you wanna say in this moment that, as you were saying, so many people want to do this work but don't quite know what to do. But I think the other piece of that is they're so afraid to get it wrong that they oftentimes don't engage in the conversation or the work at all.

0:11:31.1 JC: And one thing I don't like about this policy score piece is that it is so quantifiable, which means there's a right and a wrong when we know that it's just so much more complex than that. And so that's why when it is paired with TA, and that's where, again, doing it in person with people or on Zoom with people, was so much more meaningful as we got to talk through. And this might not be the right thing for your specific community, but how can we make some movement towards that? How can we do what will work in your community? And the language is going to change. What is right today or "big bunny ears right today" might be different than what big bunny ears is right 10 years from now.

0:12:16.9 JC: And so maybe the questions would shift, but the important piece is that you as an agency are actively engaging in making your space, your agency, your community, safer for, in this case, trans non-binary folks. So across the state, one, I would think it would need to be adapted depending on the community, and two, I think it would be really interesting to pair those results over time with legislative changes over time. Here in New Mexico, we've had some big legislative shifts that have increased protections for transgender non-binary communities over the last year in some really big ways. Shout out to Quality New Mexico who led that work just brilliantly. So I think pairing those two pieces together could be an interesting way to look at the overall culture shift to New Mexico, 'cause the policy piece within the agencies is important, but we're also looking for those hearts and minds to also shift towards believing that everyone deserves to be safe in their community.

0:13:24.6 ML: Yeah, I love thinking about all of the possibilities for something like this, how we can quantify the things that are more qualitative usually, and that vary from place to place, but yeah, like you were saying, show that overall shift in terms of the culture, which is what we all wanna do, right? 

0:13:45.3 JC: And that's one of the great things about the score system. As an agency, you might start really, really low, and at the end of the six months or however long, yeah, they don't have the top scores, but they've made a lot of progress and for their community, that is huge.

0:14:02.6 ML: And then if you add that into so many communities and agencies and organizations that have all improved their score, that's gotta feel really different for people who are in that community and accessing those services. Perfect.

0:14:18.8 JC: And engaging in the TA effort, the decision makers in those spaces are getting so much more knowledge to help them actually implement those policies more effectively because they're getting the nuance that can come in a policy scan because we're having longer conversations about what that could look like in their community and the reasons behind those things in the first place.

0:14:42.0 ML: Yeah, this sounds so great and I just feel like at this point, there's gonna be a lot of people who are really interested in using this and try it out in their own work. I'm happy to say that we'll have the link to this policy checklist in our show notes so you can use it. And you've already given so much good advice in terms of what folks should really be thinking about in terms of making adaptations or modifications to this, making sure you're not just sending this to someone to fill out, but making sure it's part of a conversation, and an ongoing process, making sure you're pairing it with that TA and training aspect. I'm wondering if there's any other advice that you have for people who wanna use this kind of tool in helping them evaluate their own community level prevention work.

0:15:30.2 JC: And so this part is kind of tricky in that if you're using an evaluation tool over the course of the year or four years, whatever that might look like for you, the idea is that you don't change it. Use the same evaluation tool across the board and then the tricky part with that in this context is that the best practices are shifting fairly quickly so having some mechanism and working with an evaluator to have some mechanism for accounting for those shifts without changing the integrity of the question. So that's one piece. The second would be helping whatever community you're working with move beyond... I mean, the score is great. I love the score and you can change all of the policies, but if the folks within your agency are not on board with those policies, if they are not implementing them well, if they aren't able to explain them in a way that makes sense to staff, to clients, if they don't have values that align with those policies generally, they're not gonna do a whole lot. So you can shift your score and what is on paper, but what are you doing in terms of organizational culture to really make sure that those are living and breathing policies every day? 

0:16:58.4 JC: And that's where, again, I think so much of that TAPs comes in. We can give people checklists all day long. I used to work in the service industry and yeah, I had the checklist that I would check off for my closing duties. How well were those closing duties always done? It depended on how quickly I wanted to get out of there and how much I believed that wiping the gasket for a fourth time that day was actually necessary. So the training and TAPs really needs to be paired with it. Some agencies would want us to come in and just do the training with no policy change, no policy scan, nothing like that because they really wanted or believed that they were a place that just treated everyone with respect and they just needed the right language in order to do that. And we wanna work with folks on a case-by-case basis. We don't want these policies tying us down, we don't want this controlling us. And policies are not... That's not what a good policy should be. They should be a reflection of our values and beyond that, we know that a one session training is not going to solve all of the transphobia in the world. It's not gonna happen, or even within an agency, or all of the learned dominant culture within the agencies, not gonna happen.

0:18:17.5 JC: So we do the training, we help folks have some stories, have some context for the policies. But then the policies themselves act as a mirror for that agency's values. They mirror to the staff, they mirror to the clients what that agency really values and what that agency values ideally should come from staff as well, and when there's a mismatch there, you can have all the good policies in the world, but it's not gonna go well.

0:18:46.5 ML: I feel like you're giving the context that is needed for something like this, 'cause I can imagine a lot of people being like, "Awesome. I'm gonna get this and just have people fill it out in disregard." But other stuff... Do you know what I mean? 

0:19:00.2 JC: Yes. Yeah, probably.

0:19:00.4 ML: I'm glad that you're talking about that.

0:19:03.5 JC: Yeah. Helping an agency see that writing things down, putting them in policy is what will lead to lasting change, lasting culture change, I think was the biggest hurdle. And a lot of the time, it took me saying, "Yes, I know you director or operations manager. I know you are here, and you're clearly engaged in this work, 'cause you're engaged with me in this moment and I imagine you will not stay at this agency forever. So if you want your hopes for this agency to have any kind of clear path, if you want your belief in this agency to treat trans non-binary folks well and create a safe community for them to actually go forward and past your time at this agency, put in policies how it's gonna happen."

0:19:53.8 JC: And of course, policies have to shift as our world changes and yes, of course, they need to also be paired with training, but one on its own isn't gonna do it. And then working on issues each time, it's, one, a waste of time but two, it leads to really inconsistent results based on who's making the decision in the moment. And if you have a policy as a guidance document, of course, there's going to be exceptions to things. There are going to be moments where you have to act with some agility, but having a guiding document can help give you some direction for that.

0:20:30.0 ML: I really like that. I have to say, I love policies and procedures and changing those things as a measure of community level prevention because people really follow their policies. It becomes like this document that helps guide your work, and like you were saying, if someone leaves, then you can go back to this policy and like what does the policy say? That's great.

0:20:53.4 JC: And it's a way of de-personalizing things, especially in our world right now, especially if we're talking about trans non-binary communities, it's not about you, staff member and what you believe in this moment. This is about what the policy says and what you have to do for this client. I don't care that you don't "believe in pronouns". At this agency because we value seeing every plan is there full of self, we call people by their pronouns. Period.

0:21:21.0 ML: Yeah, it's so good to have a policy that backs that up.

0:21:24.7 JC: It's nice to have a policy to back it up.

0:21:26.5 ML: Yeah, I'm really thankful that you are willing to share this with everybody and that we've been able to talk about it more, and I love hearing about the process of how this was created and where it came from. And just hearing the partnership that you have with the Department of Health and how this has been used in so many places is really great. I just know that there's gonna be a lot of folks who wanna pick this up and try it out in their own work, but I also wanna know if there's anything else you wanna share with us. I know you have an awesome prevention podcast. I just love to hear about anything new that's coming up with you or anything that you wanna make sure folks know about.

0:22:06.7 JC: Well, the prevention podcast always was to podcast through The New Mexico coalition called Both/And: A Sexual Violence Prevention Podcast, a series of interviews with folks in the prevention field and out of the prevention field in intersecting spaces. So I'm always on the podcast to talk about the social ecological model we dorked out a lot. It was super fun. And then I also interview authors and podcast host for pop culture podcasts and any places where sexual violence intersects and really it's looking at what does prevention look like? What can it look like in our daily lives? So please check that out.

0:22:47.5 ML: Thanks so much for being here. This is really great as always to talk with you, and yeah, thanks for sharing more about this tool.

0:22:55.6 JC: Thank you for having me, Mo.

0:22:57.5 ML: Thanks for listening to this episode of Resource on the Go. For more information and resources about preventing sexual assault, visit our website at nsvrc.org. You can also get in touch with us by emailing resources@nsvrc-respecttogether.org.

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