00:00 Sally: Thanks for listening to this episode of Resource on the Go. For more resources and information about preventing sexual harassment, abuse and assault, visit our website at www.NSVRC.org and watch our blog for more lessons learned. You can also get in touch with us by emailing resources@NSVRC.org. 00:42 Sally: Robin and Vicky, we are so glad you could join us today. Could you tell us a little bit about yourselves? Robin, could you start us off by telling folks who you are and what drew you to the Green Dot community strategy? 01:02 Robin Christopherson: Sure. Well, it's great to be here. Thanks, Sally. Well, my name is Robin Christopherson, and I'm the Executive Director of MCVP Crisis and Prevention Center. We serve all of the Monadnock Region in Southwestern New Hampshire, and we're a member of the New Hampshire Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence. I started in the organization in 1999, and I actually started in the prevention work. So that is where my sort of foundational entrance frame into the work. We're a small organization, so anybody that was doing prevention still did direct services, as is still the case in our organization. But that is how I came to the work, so I've always had a passion to keep the prevention work in our organization alive. I became the Executive Director in 2015, and I'm still there. End date looking at October 2023, but because I'm just gonna basically age out sort of. So... [chuckle] 02:08 RC: That's who I am and I think so... Had a lot of different work in prevention, most of it cobbled together as a lot of small crisis centers did back in the early days in the mid-'90s when a lot of prevention work started, and then I was involved in the Delta Prep through our state coalition, so getting that entrance into a little bit larger look and a public health look at prevention work that had been already in that camp quite a bit. And so when the Green Dot opportunity came up, I was really excited to throw our hat in the ring and try it on for our area and certainly try it on as a fresh look at prevention. 03:01 Sally: Robin, thank you so much for sharing your background and grounding me in where I got my start in doing this work. So, thank you for bringing me back to some very powerful days I had in New Hampshire doing prevention and intervention work. I'm wondering, Vicky, if we could turn to you. You're a long-time advisor to the NSVRC, and we're grateful to your continued partnership, can you share some about your work and how you structured the evaluation for this project? 03:40 Vicky: Yeah, thanks so much, Sally and it's great to be here with both of you. I'm a professor at Rutgers the State University of New Jersey now, after my time in New Hampshire, and also in the school social work, and Associate Director of the Center on Violence Against Women and Children here, and my training, though and now, in the School of Social Work, is in clinical and community psychology. And so, as someone interested in intimate partner violence, relationship violence, sexual violence prevention, I've always been interested in that multi-level, Robin, as I think you talk about it, as thinking about individuals, but also thinking about the broader communities. And so, it was really a privilege to be able to be part of this project that was really trying to look beyond just individuals, to really thinking about these broader levels of the social-ecological model. 04:38 Vicky: Even though we weren't quite at the big societal community level of policy, and it was sort of that stage of getting there, that linking, that community building. So it was very exciting, but it was also quite a puzzle. There were really two key challenges in thinking about doing an evaluation for the project, the first was really trying to identify tools for looking at this kind of community building process and linking, specifically for sexual violence prevention. We were also faced with that while a number of programs are out there, that practitioner partners like Robin had been thinking about this, Sally, I knew you and the NSVRC have been thinking about this for a while, but that really, our evaluation of these kinds of community programs is in its infancy, and so this project really needed to look at process or implementation outcomes as well as looking at impact. 05:41 Vicky: So we were really trying to do a lot of things at the same time. Ideally, to answer the impact question, you really need to use your community or your town as your level of analysis, which means that you really need to do a very large study with lots, and lots, and lots of towns. But the resources for that are really, would be quite extensive. So instead, what we really did was to create a pilot evaluation that really sought to identify several communities that were interested in implementing the Green Dot's Community Strategy, and then trying to match them demographically to some partner towns that were interested in just doing the evaluation measures in their town and being a comparison. So that's really how we set it up, and we can go into more detail as necessary later about some of the different ways that we tried to assess that, but it was really trying to do a lot of things at the same time. 06:46 Sally: So knowing that there were these multiple levels, Robin, I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about how you approached the program implementation in your community. 07:04 RC: We had some overviews in the beginning early on and invited a lot of community partners. We had some key people that we were really looking at, and we were also trying to look at the non-traditional leaders in the kin community as the model asks for is to not just sort of the obvious people, but also some people who are leaders in maybe a non-traditional way or who have conversations with a lot of different people are able to carry messages maybe to a part of the community that isn't so obvious to everyone else or in a different way. So I would say that was probably the struggle because a lot of those people are working people. And so, trying to get a lot of their time is challenging, but we held overviews, we had a lot of people in the beginning part be interested, sustaining that level of interest certainly became a challenge. We learned a lot during our implementation time. 08:08 RC: The other thing that I think we didn't take into consideration, and this is after really processing and thinking about things, is the actual innate culture of Yankees. [chuckle] I think one of the things that we were talking about a lot was the original pilot in Alaska, where their community coming together looked really different than the kin community. There were really identified hubs where everybody went, it was a very different sense of community. New Englanders as we are all known for, we'll do anything for you, but then when we're done, we go back to our homes. I think communities are changing and evolving, which is a great thing, but that was one of the things that was a challenge for us was to try to bring as wide variety of demographics as we could into community spaces and sustain interest. 09:11 RC: The other thing that was going on at the same time for us, and we tried to get our local hospital involved, but they were in the midst of a significantly large project for them, which was originally called Vision 2020, and then it became Healthy Monadnock. And the goal was to have the healthiest community in the Monadnock Region by the year 2020. At the same time that we were trying to access them, thinking what a great partner, they're moving towards a little bit of community health, they had a large federal grant that they were managing, and they really weren't willing to take on one more little bucket of Healthy Monadnock 2020 by getting heavily involved in Green Dot. That being said, they were wonderful in other ways, giving us free space, helping to market things through their newsletter. 10:03 RC: So there were some community level things going on, and honestly, we know how to do our outreach, we think we do at crisis centers, I hope we do. But community organizing is a skill set, and I think that that skill set was missing, and then staff transition as crisis centers always have, but I think we definitely got our toe in the water. And I liken it to... As I think about other things that have come and gone, I remember when I was a really green educator, and I was at a state level conference with a bunch of traditional educators from schools and administrators talking about bullying prevention, because a lot of us took that on early on in the days, and I had this hot new set of data that I was really willing to share called the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study. [chuckle] 10:57 RC: And I heard an administrator, big, rough guy in the back say, "That's junk science. Why are you talking about that?" Well, how many years later now, nobody calls that junk science that I know of, maybe some people do, but I think that laying that groundwork... A few years ago, crisis centers were talking about trauma-informed services and organizations, thinking about adverse childhood experiences and no one knew what we were talking about. Now it's on the lips of almost everyone doing Early Childhood Education. Antioch University has the Trauma-Informed Educator Certificate, so I'm hoping that we laid the groundwork to talk about this kind of community-level intervention, it's got a great metaphor, it's got a great visual. That was another thing that drew me because I'm a visual person. 11:48 RC: So that idea of the map and accessible language, changing the language, so it isn't the same thing that everyone's been hearing that then they tune out. So I think we laid the groundwork. But we certainly had some challenges and Vicky, we've talked about this a lot. We ended up with a core group of people who were very dedicated to the mission, but they were from a very narrow demographic in the community. They were reaching out to their circles of influence, but it became limited, and they were semi-retired people who had the time to do that, but had a little bit narrower group that they had their ear. So that was really, rambling, there you go. 12:34 Sally: No, that was great. And Robin, you've actually set us up for... We're doing an upcoming podcast on ACEs on. So, thank you for getting our listeners ready to talk more about that. I'm wondering, Vicky, since Robin talked about some of the challenges with community readiness, I'm wondering if you could talk about that issue and assessing readiness, since that seems to be coming up as a key element of this process, can you talk about how the project team approached asset mapping? 13:17 Vicky: Great, it's a good question. And Robin, I really appreciate your use of the phrase, setting a foundation, because I think that's also really where we landed with the evaluation, which was setting a foundation in a number of ways. So, the first way that that really happened, and this is related to what you're asking about what readiness is, it's also readiness for evaluation. And really, partnership and collaboration. Robin's mentioned that in terms of the implementation about engaging more community partners. That was also very much our goal as evaluators, was really needing to engage with our partners, needing to engage with the community, to really develop a multi-pronged approach to assessing readiness and ultimately to assessing implementation and outcome. 14:11 Vicky: And so, the first year of the project, for example, was a lot of conversations with the folks at Alteristic and the Green Dot program, with Robin and her team, with other key community partners because we did surveys in the high school, we did survey out with adults in the community, but part of what that required was the idea of community readiness and assessing it and assessing other dimensions of this community building and community impact has been done in other spheres of prevention, like substance use. But it's not as well developed in our lane of sexual violence, relationship violence prevention, and so we also needed to do a lot of adaptation of questions and tools and really making sure that we were getting out a baseline of what we were trying to understand. 15:08 Sally: And so what we really ended up doing was a mixed method study, which to really try to capture a number of different aspects of prevention and community readiness. For example, in the first year of the project, we did a lot of key informant interviews with key community leaders, with town council members, with folks in law enforcement, folks in the non-profit center, in healthcare, in the business community. We tried to get a sample of as many folks as we could to really talk about their perceptions of how do conversations take place or not take place around sexual violence and relationship violence prevention in this community? 15:50 Sally: We also did this with community members, we used a method called Content Mapping, which is a very structured focus group methodology to really try to understand how is it that regular community members and citizens think about these prevention topics. Are they happening in their community? We also, because the Green Dot strategy does rest a great deal on bystander intervention, we asked a lot of questions about what are some of the social norms and community norms about it? The community building strategy was really some of the aims for around increasing collective efficacy or that sense of community and cohesion to solve this problem and prevent these forms of violence and also to shift those social norms, so we started by trying to hear lots of voices in the community about what they were thinking about. 16:43 Vicky: We did surveys with adults in the community, we did surveys in the high schools, and some of that foundational work was also just making sure that those questions and things were really able to capture this. Because again, there wasn't a lot of that out there. We also did some... In a very preliminary way, we looked at some visual cues. So again, one of the things that we know about trying to study community level prevention is really looking at physical spaces, and so we were really interested in, if you had never been to this town and you were driving through and you parked your car and you started walking on Maine Street, what might tell you that this is a community where sexual violence, intimate partner violence are not tolerated and where people feel like everyone has a role to play in prevention? And so we also worked to try to document some of those kind of visual kinds of cues and things that you might get from walking through the town. So there was a lot of that foundational work in trying to assess where are communities that would also set us up for looking at whether any of those things shifted over time. 17:51 Sally: I'm really excited to hear you talk about those visual assessments and those walking or moving through a community tours. I know lots of folks will be interested in learning more about that. As the two of you have been reviewing the work of this collaborative team, what would you say were the successes of the program? And I don't know, Robin, if you would like to start us off in sharing what you think are some of the successes. 18:31 RC: Sure. I think we sort of already talked about it in a broad way and that is laying the foundation. And I liken it to my little story about Adverse Childhood Experiences Study. That was probably back in maybe 2000, I was really just started to the organization and got shipped off to present at a conference and was nervous as anything, and then I had this kind of heckler, [chuckle] telling me that it was junk science. And then even a few years ago when we were trying to talk about that, no one knew what we were talking about, and now, as I said, it's on the lips of everyone. So what I think we may have done, and I'm hoping, because I know that Turning Points Network, our sister agency that also participated in Claremont, is interested in still trying to do some continued Green Dot new level work on preventing sexual violence, is that we laid some great ground work. 19:24 RC: Towards the end, we made some really great connections. And we still got people looking at some of our Green Dot stuff that's out there on social media. I still have my big green bubble suit and green wig down in the office that I can put on at any time if needed should be like the Green Dot cartoon figure. I put it on every once in a while and run around the office when we need to cheer up a little bit, it's got one of those fans that blows it up. I think that timing is everything. Just in this conversation, a lot of things have come up for me, speaking with Vicky again, we don't get to talk all the time anymore [chuckle] as we did there for about four years. Timing is everything. I think about now, our hospital has sort of come wound down with their Vision 2020 turned into Healthy Monadnock 2020. 20:28 RC: Of course, we're in the middle of a pandemic, that makes things a little dicey to try to do a lot of large group gatherings, but I also think about the City of Keene in the time that we have concluded with the work there, there was a big project called Walldogs, that came to Keene, which I don't know if you're familiar with that, but it's very visual. Sign painters and artists from all over the United States come to a town and create these historic images. Keene chose a lot of historic images. And so they're on specific places all over Keene, and there were walking tours and it was a huge success. So talk about something to ride on with another visual, the visual cues and saying what in the community would tell you, oh, people are walking around looking at these wonderfully donated wall murals to add some Green Dot activities in there. 21:20 RC: The Mayor of the City of Keene now is one of our board members, the new mayor, so that would have really... In my fantasy world, it would have helped us get some more buy-in from the City of Keene. So I think about the timing of things, but I really, truly think that the success was, we laid the foundation, there are still people in the community who know what Green Dot is, and I think that the Keene community, perhaps through the pandemic, but through some other things, seems to start to really be coming together, especially the downtown area where a lot of visual things would be happening. 22:00 RC: I think that there's still an opportunity there, and I think that those messages aren't forgotten, and I think of course, all along, I thought the accessibility of Green Dot and taking something that you're saying you're changing cultural norms, which seems so big and just not even doable, undertake-able, let alone doable to take it, put it into bite-sized pieces and say, "This is how it's done," and then have the visual that goes, "Here are the dots," and you just keep changing them one dot at a time. And it doesn't take heroic efforts, and it doesn't take everybody to be that person that's going to intervene at a high level. There are proactive things to do too, in addition to the reactive. So I think the success was the foundational work, and I think timing is a lot as it is in a lot of things in life. 22:53 Sally: Robin, that is so true, I think timing and readiness are key. I'm so glad to hear you talk about how your work is moving on and continuing in these new ways because of the foundation that you were able to build in your community. Vicky, do you have other thoughts about some of the lessons learned and successes that your team has been able to pull out of the last several years of this really hard and very challenging work? 23:28 Vicky: Yeah, thanks, and I think what I have to offer is some of what we learned in the evaluation very much mirrors, Robin, what you're talking about. I also just wanna really say a shout-out to our prevention partners in this because I do really admire your courage Robin, all of your courage, in taking this on because I think it is not easy to be the early adopters in our Diffusion of Innovation Model. Even from the beginning of this project, it was so clear to me that there were some communities that really were willing to step out and try something that people thought was a good idea, but we didn't quite know how it was gonna be implemented and we learned a lot. I always feel like a lot of times the most important thing that comes out of a project is what I learn and what we can apply to do next time. 24:25 Vicky: I think there's a couple things that we learned. Certainly from an evaluation standpoint, we learned the importance of using mixed methods, a true mixed methods approach, which is really to intentionally think about collecting a number of different data points and putting them in conversation with each other. We had survey questions and information from young people in high schools. We had survey questions from a broad sample of adults. We had interviews with town leaders. We had the views of Main Street visually, we had the concept mapping focus groups with ordinary citizens from the community. In our analyses, we really tried to put those things in relationship to each other to say, where do the things fit and where do they not fit. And so for example, I think that one of the things that we certainly did find was that this was, from a feasibility standpoint, which is one of the first steps in evaluation is feasibility and acceptability, can you do this? And do people like it. 25:42 Vicky: And that's the first step before you even start to say, "Did it work?" And I think we got some real convergent data that suggest that it was feasible and acceptable, and even with the challenges, Robin, that you talked about, I think that when we interviewed town leaders, then later in the grant, after the program had been implemented, when we did the concept mapping we really saw some shifts. The folks who had participated actively, who participated in steering committee interviews at the end of the project, really talked about this new way of thinking about prevention and how that really resonated with people. We saw in the surveys that from a quarter to a third of just a representative direct mail survey of adults showed that people had heard about Green Dot, and if you compare the folks who had heard about it to those who hadn't, it's not launched to no, we can't say causality or anything, but the folks who had heard about it were also those who were reporting a greater sense of community, reporting those more positive social norms. 26:48 Vicky: We saw in the concept mapping that folks in town were talking more about the conversational aspect of being bystanders and doing prevention rather than this sort of, it's just the job over here. We saw indications that people were seeing themselves more in that involvement, and so I think that really is the foundation than when we think about... I think a lot of times in our social-ecological model, we think about these separate levels as though they're disconnected. When you really read the social-ecological model, when it was developed, it's really about the relationships between those levels. And that it is in those relationships that the work is really happening, and I think that what we were seeing in the data that really supports what Robin is saying is we were seeing those conversations. We were hearing about those shifting perceptions and those linkages that I think then makes those outer level changes possible. 27:49 Vicky: So when we read about changing physical spaces, or enacting new policies, or changing alcohol outlet density, all that stuff that gets named as this community level change related to prevention, the foundation of all that are the kinds of relationships and shifts and thinking that Robin's talking about, and that we also very much saw in our data. And so just to summarize that, I think my take home message in learning about that is really the importance of these kind of using mixed and multiple methods in our evaluation rather than just... We wouldn't have seen that if we had just done surveys, say with adults, we would have really missed a lot of what was going on. 28:40 Sally: Vicky, I really appreciate you both talking about the approach for the evaluation and what you learned about what works there when we're looking at large-scale community level prevention efforts. I also appreciate that you're talking about relationships and as we are as a country and in our individual communities and organizations looking at our anti-oppression work more broadly, I think those authentic relationships and partnerships are coming up as being critical components to sustainability and to actually changing things in our culture. So thank you for providing a great connection to a variety of other things that are happening in our world right now. Well, as we think about closing our time together today, do you have any advice for other programs and program evaluators that might be looking to implement a similar strategy? I know that there are folks that are looking to do something similar, so Robin what advice would you give people? 29:58 RC: All I can think about is after what Vicky said is like what she said, but again... [chuckle] and that's why you have an evaluator, "pu rum pum pump." I hear the drum beat going out. [chuckle] Because it's a whole different mindset from what we do on the ground, as it should be, because we want everything to work, we just don't... We aren't all necessarily research scientists, and for a long time, we were all trying to play that role in the infancy of our prevention work, trying to take pieces of this and that, and make it work. It was the best we had. So for me, it's so exciting to see research science coming to our intimate partner violence, sexual violence prevention work. It's still something that we're struggling with in individual crisis centers or is taking something that really works, that then is going to be digestible for whatever community or population that you're going to try to implement with. 30:57 RC: I think that not everybody's gonna have the opportunity to work on a project like this and have an evaluator on board as part of it, but it's so important. I've got a couple of really dedicated educators and we even changed our mission statement at MCVP a few years back, and we're looking at maybe flip-flopping it, so that the prevention point is first and the intervention point is second, trying to say, "We've got to turn that tide at some point." So lessons learned, the ramp-up, it's the same thing that everyone has said so far, or both of us I should say, is that readiness time. I think it takes more... That's almost when the really heavy lift is, it doesn't feel like it at the time but that is when really, you need to be all in and getting that community readiness and getting people on board, and then sustaining that level of interest to do it. So I think the lesson learned is doing all of these activities, but then having somebody to say, "This was meaningful, and this is what science tells us why it is meaningful." 32:20 Sally: Robin, thank you. I really like how you're naming that that capacity building work is critical work. We don't often have time for that built into grants. It seems like a luxury, oftentimes, and when we're able to build partnerships with evaluators or researchers, they can often help us map out what kind of time may be needed. And I also really am interested in what you shared about this community project, also being an organizational development project where there were shifts and changes that have happened as you all have been thinking about capacity and sustainability. So, thank you so much for bringing that up. Vicky, do you have any advice that you would offer? 33:22 Vicky: Yes. In addition to the incredible importance of partnership and ongoing collaboration, and the communication and relationship building in an ongoing way that is so foundational for doing this, I think I would say patience, time, and flexibility. So I think that the patience and time go together because when you're doing a mixed methods approach, you really have to take some time to put the different pieces together and to put them in place and to really learn about... If you're trying to engage people in different ways, you have to learn about that unique community and where you go to recruit people. It took us a little while, but for some of our strategies, for example, we tabled at the farmer's market, 'cause that's where you find people, in New England, in the summer. Right? And so, learning those kinds of strategies and having the kind of patience to do that. 34:23 Vicky: One of the things I know is starting to come out in prevention, there was an evaluation that Anne Kocher and her group did at Green Dot High School, and they found that it took three to four years to see the program impacts in the high school, and they felt like they described that as, that's the time it takes to get saturation. Okay, that's a high school. Even if it's a big high school like we have here in New Jersey, where it's thousands of kids, that's not nearly the size of any of these communities that we're talking about. So the timeline for really seeing what we're used to talking about as outcome impacts, is a much longer horizon, I think. And as you point out, Robin, the impacts along the way are multiple, but we have to be looking for them. And I think the flexibility, one of the things, and I need to give a shout-out, this project was funded by the CDC. Of course, none of their views are represented in what I said, but I do need to give a shout-out that they supported the evaluation of this, and that it was done for a cooperative agreement, which is a unique research grant that really allows for input in an ongoing way from the science officers, and that allowed for flexibility and pivoting and responding to changing conditions in the community, in a way that I think is really necessary in this work. 35:49 Sally: Well, Vicky and Robin, thank you for bringing your passion and the realness to this discussion about the challenges and the hopefulness in doing community level prevention. I really appreciate Vicky, you bringing up patience, time and flexibility, which I'm gonna hold on to as we move forward. We so appreciate your time today, and we'll be looking to do some follow-up conversations via the NSVRC blog about this project. So, hopefully our listeners will be on the lookout for that. And thank you all for listening. Thanks so much for joining us. 36:42 Sally: Thanks for listening to this episode of Resource on the Go. For more resources and information about preventing sexual harassment, abuse and assault, visit our website at www.nsvrc.org and watch our blog for more lessons learned. You can also get in touch with us by emailing resources@nsvrc.org.