País: United States

Organization: Center for the Study of Sport in Society

Focus of activity - Education

Year the initiative began - 1993

Description of Initiative - What is the main focus (products, services, etc.) of your initiative and how does it contribute to ending or preventing domestic violence? What principal aspect of domestic violence are you addressing? What activities does it involve for your organization? Who are your primary beneficiaries and target groups? 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 - Demonstrate how your approach differs from other programs in the field? Which specific components of your initiative are particularly effective, novel, or unique (e.g., the products and services, the technology used, the delivery, or financing mechanism)? 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 - How does your initiative reach its target populations? What communications mechanism(s) do you have in place? How do you measure their impact? 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 - What key partnerships have you established to make your model possible or more efficient? Who are your partners (business, social, government, other) and what are their roles? How central are these partnerships for your initiative. 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 - Which mechanisms do you have in place to ensure that your beneficiaries can afford your products or services? Do you have financial schemes or arrangements for low-income and marginalized populations? 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 - What has been the concrete impact of your project to date? How many people have benefited from your program in total? What policies, communities, or institutions have been influenced to make fundamental changes because of your work? 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 - What is your priority for the next 3 years and please describe why. 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 - Tell the personal story that will help people connect to your work. How did the initiative start? Was there a particular individual or event driving the idea? Tell the reader the story behind the innovation. 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 - List the two (2) main obstacles to scale up your innovation (policy, legal, organizational, people, financial, etc.)? 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 - What are your major challenges with partnerships? (E.g., identification of partners, implementation of partnerships, relationship management, etc.) 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.