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>View discussions about this entry Country: United States
Organization: Center for the Study of Sport in Society
Focus of activity: Education
Year the initiative began: 1993
Positioning in the Mosaic of solutions
Description of Initiative: The Mentors in Violence Prevention (MVP) Program is a gender violence prevention and education program of Northeastern University’s Center for the Study of Sport in Society. MVP was designed on the premise that male and female student leaders can play a unique and central role in solving problems in schools that have traditionally been considered “women’s issues”: rape, battering, and sexual harassment.
Innovation: Utilizing a unique bystander approach to prevention, MVP views male and female students not as potential perpetrators or victims, but as bystanders who can be empowered to confront abusive peers.
Delivery Model: The MVP Program, composed of male and female former professional and college student-athletes, conducts gender violence prevention trainings for a wide variety of high school and college populations. Typically, the racially, diverse MVP staff provides both mixed-gender and single gender sessions. Both interactive sessions consist of awereness-raising activities and scenarios that utilize the program's key teaching tool, the MVP Playbook
Key Operational Partnerships: Partnerships are central to the MVP program. High schools are the most important partnerships, as MVP trains students during in school time. Also, community organizations that focus on young people are important as well, for they provide us with opportunities to train in after-school settings.
Financial Model: MVP is largely run on grants. Grants provide MVP with the ability to offer trainings free of cost to public schools and non-profit after school programs. Part of MVP's scope of service is to work with young people who are receiving aid from the department of social services.
Effectiveness: MVP has been proven to be effective through a multi-year, independent evaluation. Utilizing a mixed-methods approach, MVP has been shown to produce significant positive change in students' knowledge and behaviors relating to gender violence and prevention. To view the evaluation, please go to http://www.sportinsociety.org/vpd/mvp.php .
Scaling up Strategy: The first priority for MVP over the next three years is to increase the amount of schools that MVP works with in the New England Area. Currently, MVP has a waiting list of over 20 schools that want training. However, MVP does not have the financial resources to meet these needs. The challenge for MVP will be to find the resources so that it can provide free trainings for schools.
Origin of the Initiative: Jackson Katz created the MVP program. Katz worked at a battered women's shelter and realized that only women were working on this issue. Katz felt like this was odd, because abusive men were the reason for women being at the shelter and that men needed to be apart of the solution to ending violence against women. Wanting to use their status as former football players, Katz worked with Byron Hurt to create a program that would use athletes to speak out and work toward ending men's violence against women. MVP is unique, because it does not look at men as potential perpetrators of violence or women as potential survivors of violence, but both males and females as empowered bystanders who can intervene in abusive situations.
Main Obstacles to Scaling Up: The financial implication of scaling up has been a difficult obstacle. With an ever-growing waiting list, MVP cannot meet the needs of its partners without hiring and training new staff, which costs money. Partnerships are another obstacle to MVP's growth. Though MVP is able to partner with schools and after school programs, it has not been able to find a for profit stake holder that would be willing to help sustain the program on a long term basis and make it less reliant on grants.
Main Partnership Challenges: The main partnership challenge of MVP is being able to meet the demand for the training. MVP has a extremely long waiting list, but does not have the staff to train all the schools and after-school organizations that want to empower young people to end men's violence against women.
Contact Information:
Jarrod Chin
Manager of Violence Prevention and Diversity Center for the Study of Sport in Society (Non-Profit) j.chin@neu.edu 360 Huntington Ave., Suite 350 RI, Boston, MA 02125 United States Tel: 617 373-8420 Fax: 617 373-4566 Website: sportinsociety.org Discussions about this entry |
Mentors in Violence Prevention (MVP) Program: A Bystander Approach to Gender Violence Prevention
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