Dear Changemakers Community,

Welcome to the “No Private Matter! Ending Abuse in Intimate and Family Relations” collaborative competition. This is the first in a series of Changemakers’s Collaborative Competitions sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF). RWJF's aim for this competition is to find innovative solutions and to catalyze a community of changemakers to help eliminate intimate partner violence in the United States.

RWJF’s mission is to improve the health and health care of all Americans. We are pleased to partner with Changemakers to find promising solutions—from within the U.S. and around the world—that can be used to end domestic violence. The innovations surfaced through this competition, and the discussion generated around them, will help to inform any future U.S. grantmaking we may do in this area. But we also hope that the field of social entrepreneurs, researchers, health and social service providers, funders, advocates and policymakers working everywhere on intimate partner violence will benefit from this set of ideas.

We invite you to participate by entering your innovation, helping refine the strategies presented by participants, and finding ways to connect the solutions to the resources needed to make everyone a changemaker. Changemakers’s “open sourcing social solutions™” model provides a powerful mechanism for generating new innovations, innovators, and opportunities to end domestic abuse.

Domestic abuse is an entrenched problem that requires a diverse set of approaches that are tailored to the needs of affected populations. The process begins with the “No Private Matter!” Mosaic of Solutions, which outlines the central barriers and the insights to propel change on this issue. The mosaic will serve as the framework for the collaborative competition and your participation.

The title—“No Private Matter!”—is emphatic by design. Domestic abuse, intimate partner violence and relationship violence in all its forms are emphatically not private. The consequences touch us all. “No Private Matter!” wants to grab your attention and prompt as much creative problem-solving and action as you can possibly muster to prevent violence.

It was first important to acknowledge that the impact of this violence on its victims and its perpetrators is universal. This led to the competition’s core objective: to engage everyone in improving the dynamics and impact of domestic violence prevention efforts.

As part of that process, we’d like to hear from you. The competition offers you the chance to showcase your ideas and your work, and it provides RWJF a uniquely valuable and rich opportunity to learn about what solutions hold promise for eliminating domestic violence in the U.S. As a part of Changemakers’s global community of peer changemakers, we want you to help test and refine the ideas surfacing through the online review attached to each entry. This level of collaboration is what will help you surface new innovations and connect to new ideas, partners, and resources.

I’m delighted to help inaugurate this first Changemakers-RWJF Collaborative Competition, and we invite you and your colleagues and networks to participate in this search for solutions now and in the months to come.

Jeane Ann Grisso
Senior Program Officer
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation