00:00 Sally Laskey: Welcome to Resource on the Go, a podcast from the National Sexual Violence Resource Center on understanding, responding to, and preventing sexual abuse and assault. My name is Sally Laskey and I am the Evaluation Coordinator at the National Sexual Violence Resource Center. Today, I'm joined by Jennifer Benner, NSVRC Resource Development Coordinator, and Melissa Emmal, Director of Training and Technical Assistance at Alteristic to talk about Green Dot Community. [music] 00:44 SL: Welcome to the podcast, Melissa. We're so glad to have you with us. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and Alteristic? 00:52 Melissa Emmal: Yes, thanks so much for having me. Again, Melissa Emmal is my name and I am the Director of Training and Technical Assistance for Alteristic. Alteristic is a small non-profit based out of Washington, DC, and our focus is on helping communities to reduce interpersonal violence and other related forms of oppression, etcetera. And we actually were, in previous years, called Green Dot etc., as an agency. That agency was born in 2010, and that is the name of one of our prevention strategies. In 2007, we rebranded and are now called Alteristic because we do a lot of other work besides just the one strategy, and so the new name is reflective of us working in some different areas. 01:43 ME: I actually started my journey in this field up in Anchorage, Alaska, where I was born and raised. And I worked at the largest domestic violence sexual assault center in Alaska, and we had a response arm and a prevention arm. And the Green Dot strategy of our community was actually born up in Alaska as well. So in 2012, we were looking for prevention strategies that would hit the community level, we had been doing some school-based work, and we were really excited by Green Dot because of the research showing some of the effectiveness on college campuses and in high schools. 02:22 ME: So we connected with them and the strategy didn't exist, and we said, "Well, so what if it doesn't exist? Let's build it." So we worked with the state of Alaska and with Green Dot at the time to build the strategy and pilot it in six different communities from rural Alaska to Anchorage, which is the biggest community that I lived in. And that is what led me to work for Alteristic ultimately. I've been here for about five years, and really the community work is my passion, and so I'm excited to be here to talk about lessons learned with the work that we did up in New England. 02:58 Jennifer Benner: Thanks, Melissa, this is Jennifer. In episode two, we talked with Dr. Vicki Banyard and Robin Kristofferson about their experiences with implementing and evaluating Green Dot Community, and we wanted to dig in a little deeper with you for folks that want to learn more about the program. Can you describe the key elements of the Green Dot Community? 03:21 ME: Yes. I'll start with the key elements of the actual curricular component, so the things that the community members would learn if they came to a Green Dot training, and then I'll give you a snapshot of what the larger mobilizing strategy looks like. We go through four different areas of prevention with all of our curricular components. The first is, "How can we connect community members to being able to recognize warning signs, recognizing acts of potential harm?" The community strategy seeks to address forms of harm related to sexual violence, domestic violence, stalking, and child abuse. So how do community members identify when something is concerning? 04:05 ME: The second thing is to acknowledge what is a truth, and that is, it is not always easy to intervene even when we know that we're looking at something harmful, and even when we're concerned. And that's because there's something called barriers that can pop up and get in people's way. That could be ranging from being uncertain about what to say, to being worried about violence escalating back towards you. There's a whole host of things that can stop us. So our program seeks to give people time to acknowledge what makes it difficult for them as individuals, so that they can move around those obstacles and find realistic ways to get involved. 04:45 ME: And that is the third step, is reactive responses, reactive responses to a concerning behavior. So once a community member has identified something concerning and has maybe acknowledged what's difficult for them in the way of getting involved or intervening, what are some realistic things they could do? So this is skill building around what do different interventions look like? We actually practice them in the training space, kind of putting words to them, making sure that folks have a lot of tools at their disposal. And not just sort of traditional direct approaches, but lots of different ways that folks can begin to intervene. 05:23 ME: And then lastly, we talk through what we call proactive behaviors or proactive responses. This is acknowledging, "You don't have to wait for a concerning behavior to cross your path to get involved in prevention." In fact, there's lots of ways that you can kind of live out loud with your values and begin to help create new community norms around these forms of interpersonal harm. Specifically the norms that we hope to impact with the Green Dot program are, one, that these forms of harm, these forms of interpersonal violence, are not tolerated in the community, and two, that all community members are expected to do their part around prevention. 06:04 ME: So those are the pieces that you'll see delivered in the curricular components, but the program is actually a broader community mobilizing strategy, and I'll just briefly go through some of those elements. It would start with building a coalition or a steering committee of representatives, hopefully, of a cross-section of the community. So representing community organizations, community groups that could look like non-profit, faith-based, the business community, different cultural groups in the community. Really depending on the community makeup, it will look different. And then building buy-in for the program. So thinking about who are the key stakeholders across the community that could really further efforts if they were bought in and engaged? And helping to make sure that those key stakeholders know what's happening and that they have positive associations with the program and with the people who are building the program and tailoring it for the community. 07:04 ME: The next step would actually be identifying, who are the people in the community who would be really great as instructors? Who would be great to get up in front of rooms full of adults in the community, and begin to offer the trainings? For Green Dot, we really like to broaden the scope of who that is, so we're not just talking about professionals who work in prevention, but unexpected messengers. So this could be people, again, representing some of those different groups I mentioned before. So the faith community or different businesses, different areas of the community. 07:39 ME: Those folks, once they're identified, go through an instructor training. It's actually a four-day long training for people to learn the different curricular components of Green Dot, to learn the underpinnings of the strategies, some of the research that informed its development. And at the end of that four-day training, those people would be certified instructors and would be able to go out and provide training in the community. 08:06 ME: The pieces of training that I've mentioned, the curricular components, there's two of them. One is a six-hour bystander workshop. It's a really fun, engaging, hope-based, positive and solution-focused workshop, really designed for lots of skill building. Participants go through different scenarios, they have a chance to analyze what their barriers might be, they practice doing some of those proactive kind of living out loud with your values behaviors. That workshop... Of course, you can't six hour train every adult in a community, that would be overwhelming. And so we get community groups that are planning prevention to think about, who are the folks in the community who are already setting the norms, who already have social influence? And let's get those folks trained first, hoping that they'll begin to diffuse prevention naturally. 08:58 ME: Then there's a one-hour workshop that's designed to be implemented anywhere. So it could be at a staff meeting at an office, it could be at a client meeting at a non-profit that serves clients in a different way. So that one hour is, again, for anybody, the six-hour is looking at social influencers. There's also some elements to the strategy designed to think about sustainability. We're helping folks think, "Okay, there's always a shelf life to a program. When Green Dot is no longer the program in your community, how can you make sure that your planning efforts now will be sustained?" What are the sticky factors that you can implement now, so that the work that you're putting in will make lasting impact?" 09:45 ME: And then we have something called community action events. So the idea is, if you're going to gather people together for events around these forms of harm, making them skill-based and actionable and positive and solution-focused instead of just awareness or information-building. If people are gonna gather, let's get them to do something around prevention. So I know that was a lot. It had quite a few elements here. I wanna pause and just see if you had any clarifying questions or needed any additional info about anything I just said. 10:20 SL: Jennifer, do you have any follow-up questions for Melissa? 10:24 JB: No, I think you really explained the program and provided a great overview of the program and who would attend everything. So no, it sounds really great. 10:37 SL: Great. Well, I'd like to take us a little bit deeper in. And it's great to hear all of the elements of the programs and get a sense about what is involved in the day-to-day work and the planning and thinking about how the program can set a community up for the future. In this community mobilizing strategy where you mentioned helping communities to live out loud with their values, I'm wondering if you could talk to us about how this program addresses connecting the compounding issues of racism, ableism, hetero-sexism and gender violence, and how this approach can help address multiple forms of oppression. 11:41 ME: Thank you for that question. One of the ways that I think about the question that you just asked in terms of how we prepare communities, is to think about our adaptation and tailoring process that we go through with the folks who are becoming trained instructors. One of the things that I believe to be very true about prevention is that numbers matter. We need most people in a community feeling invited and included and engaged in prevention so that they can engage in those reactive and proactive behaviors I mentioned. If they don't feel invited and included and welcomed to prevention efforts, they're unlikely to get matched with the skills, and they're unlikely to join the efforts. 12:27 ME: So it's critical that as communities are beginning to think about launching a program like this, that they begin to analyze how it's been going so far. So if there's already been prevention efforts in their community, how have they been received and perceived by the community? Who have they reached really well, and why? And who have they maybe left behind, and why? What are the things that they have done to contribute to either their success or lack of engagement? I know that when we were piloting this up in my community in Anchorage, Alaska and we asked that question, the people that we were reaching well is what I called the choir. 13:10 ME: So, many people sitting around a table looking a lot like me: People who had similar levels of education, people that were white, women, people that were already working in the field. And when we began to ask, "Who have we left behind?" that list was pretty long and pretty extensive. And so you can't launch prevention from that place, where the people that you are reaching are an insular group, because that won't impact the community numbers around violence. Again, numbers matter. We need lots and lots of people engaged. And so we ask people that go through our training to walk through a process with us where they ask those questions of their community team. Who have we left behind and why, and what can we do to course correct for that? 14:00 ME: And those questions can be deep questions that take a lot of self-reflection on the team. And then potentially from there to answer the question, "What do we do about it? How do we course correct?" that can also be a lengthy process of beginning to tailor and adapt efforts to make sure that folks are engaged. So asking questions like, "What steps have you taken to include and engage marginalized segments of your population? How well do your pretension efforts engage community members of color? How well do your prevention efforts engage the LGBTQ plus community?" And so allowing space for those conversations. And then we seek to give people some practical things to do about building a more inclusive program. 14:48 ME: Knowing that each community is different, we don't have one cookie-cutter thing that says, "This is the exact thing that will match your community," but what we do is walk people through a process. And so we say, "Okay, as you're tailoring these curricular components, we've given you a detailed template. You're gonna walk through those four steps of prevention that I talked about in the training, but how are you gonna do that in a way that engages different folks in your community?" So really specifically tailoring and adapting the content. 15:21 ME: And we go through some different sources of input. So we say, "As you're beginning to tailor, as you're beginning to adapt for different populations, here's where you could get information to help you with that process." So first of course, your personal expertise and your personal experience could help with that, but then we wanna talk about the cautionary side of that. We all have bias, it's important that you use your personal experience where it makes sense, but also know the limitations to that. If you're not a member of a group, tailoring and adapting for that group on your own can't work. And so then looking at other sources of input like research. Peer reviewed articles can be found that can be really helpful in terms of tailoring and adapting, but there can be limitations to research. Does the sample include the target population? Is the study rigorous? Have there been multiple studies, etcetera? 16:16 ME: And then input. Input from the target population is probably one of the best ways to adapt and tailor for a group, but it's important to make sure that that group is interested and motivated to be involved in prevention and that you are conducting maybe enough focus groups or key stakeholder interviews, that you're getting broad perspective from across that group. And that, of course, that you're selling respect and humility and not tokenizing a particular individual within a population, and that their expertise, if they are engaging in focus groups or key informant interviews, is honored and there's compensation for time, etcetera. 17:02 ME: So there's a lot of considerations. And we keep coming back in the training space as we're working with communities to that idea of numbers really matter, and reaching one or two groups in your community well and leaving many out is never gonna get you to a place of critical mass with prevention. And although we don't have every answer, and this is an area that as an agency and as of course individuals, we continue to learn and grow about, we know that these are really critical conversations for communities to be having before they just launch another program. 17:39 SL: Melissa, thank you so much for talking a bit about how this is woven in to the program philosophy and the support for culturally-specific and community-driven adaptations. I really appreciate you sharing so much about that. 17:58 ME: Thank you. 18:00 JB: Now that we learned more about the program, what have you been learning through recent large-scale evaluations of the program? 18:07 ME: Well, first, I just wanna say how lucky we feel that we have been able to be involved in now a couple of different... So the tailoring process up in Alaska where of course we... The pilot process up in Alaska where we learned a ton to inform the program. And now this work up in New England where we have the pleasure of working with outside researchers who can really teach us a lot that we wouldn't have been able to uncover or learn on our own. So we feel, as program developers, really, really lucky to be able to learn these lessons, and we know it's going to make our work even better over time. 18:46 ME: I will say that for me, one of the biggest lessons learned that sticks with me and that going forward in my community work I'm keeping an eye on how I can accommodate for, is the need for more time at the beginning process, at the beginning phases of prevention before a program is launched out into a community, more time to organize and plan and build relationships and coalitions, and kinda getting those key stakeholders on board. And of course, I just walked through, in a couple of minutes, a tailoring process that also could take quite a lot of time thinking about, how do you identify groups that you wanna train first? Who are the folks who are gonna take longer to build maybe bridges or rebuild bridges, to and with? So, it can take a lot of time. 19:37 ME: And what I know the tension is, is that folks that are working in communities are often driven by what funding is available. And I will say there's never enough funding available and response, of course, needs to continue to be fully funded. And so there can be tension there like, "How are we allocating resources between helping folks that have or been harmed versus prevention?" And as folks are dealing with requirements for funding, it can be easy to try to meet those requirements, which might mean skipping some of the planning process. If a grant says, "Okay, you have to train 475 community members by the second quarter," or something like that, and you chase that instead of building your foundation, it can really impact the success of the program later. 20:28 ME: And so part of what we are trying to do better on our end development-wise is figure out, how can we make it as easy and streamlined as possible? So are there more tools that we can develop that will help people in those planning phases? How can we be better with our technical assistance process before launching a program? So that we're really walking with the community through some of these processes, and maybe even literally being in some of the planning meetings and in some of the focus groups and things like that, so that that process can be as robust as is needed, but as quick as possible. Because I don't think that funding tension is going to go away, so we need to get more concrete and realistic with that piece, so that communities are set up better for success. 21:20 JB: Thank you. And for those that might be looking to implement Green Dot Community, what exactly does that look like? What are the costs, the resources needed, and training requirements? 21:33 ME: So, I'll start with the cost because I know everybody wants to know what's the bottom line. So the cost for us to come out to a community and provide that four-day instructor training is $15,000 as a base cost. And that covers the trainer time and it covers the license to the program, and it covers the technical assistance that would be prior to the training and ongoing. So there's a lot of elements within that cost. There's also a per-person cost just for the manuals. So the actual training manuals that people receive hard-copy, and that cost varies depending on how many people are trained. 22:16 ME: Now, the four-day instructor training, at the end of it, anybody who comes through that whole four days is certified to go out into the community and teach those pieces of curricular content. So that longer workshop, and then the one-hour overview training that I mentioned. But there may be interest from other community members and a need from the planning group to have more people come through the training than just the instructors. So it may be that there are key stakeholders in the community who would benefit from getting a really good kind of dip into the program and kind of intersect with the instructors, and so folks can come through pieces of that four-day and we work with communities to make that work for them. So maybe the mayor wants to come for a couple hours in the morning and get a sense of the program, et cetera. So more people can come than just those who will be front-facing instructors. 23:14 ME: And then in terms of who contracts with us, that can vary community by community. We always want for the community agencies that are doing the work of response and prevention around domestic violence and sexual assault to be one of the partner agencies, both because they have subject matter expertise and because, of course, it just makes sense that they would be part of a community effort around this. But we also encourage communities to think about how they can broaden the scope of who is taking ownership over prevention, so that it's not just left to those agencies. It's easy for the community to dismiss a new initiative coming out of the rape crisis center as, "Well, of course, that's that thing that those people are responsible for doing," versus if the initiative is launched either by a partnership, so maybe another non-profit or a faith-based community or a business partnered with the rape crisis or domestic violence center. That can be an interesting thing. 24:13 ME: The idea is to begin to... Even at the beginning phases of planning the partners, how can we begin to show the community that prevention is about everybody, that we really need all folks involved? So a quick example of what that can look like on the ground is in Anchorage, when we launched Green Dot publicly out to the community, we did it from a coalition of non-profits and business partners and faith-based... Different faith-based communities. But the person who spoke on the news about the initiative instead of it being me, the Deputy Director of the Center, who of course has been sort of the face of these issues for years, it was actually the owner of a local bar who gave the initial interview about Green Dot. 25:04 ME: And he said, "I joined this initiative because I care about the people who work for me, and I care about the people who come into my establishment. And the reality is there's too many sexual assaults happening that initiate maybe earlier in the night at places that serve alcohol and are downtown, and I care about that, and I'm here to get involved, and there's a place for all of us." That message lands differently with the community than the usual messengers. So we ask people to think outside the box in terms of who all they get involved right from the beginning. 25:40 SL: Melissa, I like that you brought up that we need everyone invested in engaging in prevention, completely agree. We need program developers like you. [chuckle] And I wanna know how you promote program fidelity and account for the unique community needs and possibly distinct areas of focus that might develop during the implementation of Green Dot community. 26:10 ME: Yeah. Fidelity is really important in that, of course, if you just take a program and pull it all apart and just do the elements you feel like, then you can't expect the outcomes that the program intended. And programs need to be highly tailorable and adaptable so that they fit the community and feel like the community owns them, and again, there's tension there. [chuckle] And how do you navigate that? So on our end what we do is we provide some fidelity tools, both for the curricular components that help people to navigate how far they can adapt, where they should adapt, and so as they're practicing the content with each other, it's like, "These are the required elements that you can't take out, and then these are the places that you really should be using word choice and context, etcetera, specific to your community." 27:00 ME: Also, we've developed some fidelity tools around the actual implementation structure. So things like prevention does need to come from a partnership or a coalition, and things like selecting those social influencers to be trained across different populations within the community. Some of those elements are really critical to Green Dot being Green Dot, and they're there because research has shown that they are effective. Now, as we learn new things, we are going to continue to tweak and alter our strategy. We are not connected to it staying a certain way for the sake of it staying a certain way, we wanna keep making improvements, which is why we're so thankful to be involved in this partnership. As we learn more, we'll push that out to the field. What we ask is for community members should just stay in really close contact with us, so that as things are needing to be shifted and adapted, we can learn from that and help them along that path. 28:04 ME: Another thing that we've been focused on is helping to educate funding bodies. So for example, right now, there's a lot of extensive work being done in North Dakota in community implementations. They now have four different community sites that are implementing. And their funding comes through their department of health, they have rape prevention education grant through their department of health. And the folks that work at their department of health have now been through our instructor training several times. They've connected with us really intensively about how they can best manage the grant. So they are giving the communities credit and paying for the communities to go through the planning process and in fact saying, "Whoa, whoa, whoa." [chuckle] When they are just saying, "No, we wanna launch into training," when they haven't actually reached the benchmarks in terms of a coalition building and the key stakeholder buy-in. 28:58 ME: So, really, really awesome to see funders acknowledging the importance of that process and acknowledging that it takes time and that people need to be... There needs to be FTE positions that pay for things like having one-on-one conversations about prevention and doing personal invites to people for trainings like this so that they know what they're getting into and conducting focus groups. All of those things are as or more important than just the front-facing training time in a room. 29:33 JB: That's all, thank you for all of that. Is there anything else that you would like folks to know about the Green Dot Community? 29:46 ME: Just that we are excited to continue to learn alongside communities, and we are also really open to... It doesn't cost anything to give us a call to talk through what's happening in your community and what areas of prevention you might be interested in focusing on. So please feel free. I would just want folks listening to know that we're a resource as you are engaging in prevention in your community, even if you're not specifically interested ready to take on a program like Green Dot. We love having conversations with community members and helping to problem-solve and learn together. So know that we're a resource, I think, would be an important thing I'd like folks to know. 30:32 SL: Well, Melissa, you've certainly been a resource to us today. I wanna thank you for holding up the importance of planning and talking with people about prevention, and that this is indeed a time where those conversations, and really valuing that time to connect and plan for how we're gonna change the world together is happening. So, Jennifer, thank you for being part of our learning today. I'm really grateful for the conversation. We've got a few things happening, we actually have a case study that will be coming out related to some lessons learned from the folks in New Hampshire. And we're just excited to see how Green Dot community and other community-level prevention strategies develop over the months to come. So thank you so much, Melissa, and we will check in with folks on our next episode. 31:47 ME: Thank you so much for having me, I really appreciate it. [music] 32:00 Announcer: Thanks for listening to this episode of Resource On The Go. For more resources and information about preventing sexual assault, visit our website at www.nsvrc.org. You can also get in touch with us by emailing resources@nsvrc.org.