Collective Knowledge Base

Using this Knowledge Base

The knowledge base reflects the collective knowledge we gained through trial and error over the past several years combined with our decades of prior experience. We hope that by collecting and sharing our experiences we can help other organizations and coalitions strengthen their work and the broader movement for community safety.

We recognize that we don’t have all the answers and that this knowledge base is not exhaustive. Even more, every community has its own nuances that need different approaches. We encourage you to take the pieces that resonate with you and adapt it for your own contexts. One helpful analogy for this knowledge base might be a “cookbook” or “recipe guide” that you can draw on to create strategies that fit your community’s ingredients and tastes.

Scroll down for an overview of our holistic programmatic model (what we work on) and our collaborative model (how we work together), or click the button below to start exploring our Knowledge Base.

Respond, Restore, Reform: A three-pronged approach

A holistic vision of community safety–one that prioritizes both short-term and long-term solutions, healing, and thriving–requires a multi-pronged approach. Our model has three main components:

  • The core of our response prong is to meet the needs of victims and survivors of harm in the immediate aftermath of an incident. We provide comprehensive victims services, including case management, mental health services, and financial assistance. Our school and street outreach teams connect students and business owners with resources to recover from harm. In addition to support immediately after an incident, we have created support groups to help survivors heal from trauma experienced in the past.

    We also recognize that harm can ripple out from an individual and their families to the broader community. For certain cases, we activate our rapid response protocol to organize community healing events and collective actions to support community empowerment and healing from vicarious trauma. For cases that have attracted media attention and misinformation, we engage with English and Chinese-language media to protect victims, survivors, and their families from being retraumatized by media coverage and figures working for their own political gain, dispel misinformation, and offer more holistic and system-focused narratives of violence.

    A burgeoning line of work under our response prong is harm prevention. Our street, school, and resident services teams build relationships with community members, enabling the teams to connect community members with services to reduce stress and conflict. Those relationships also enable these teams to foster information sharing to promote safety and de-escalate potentially violent interactions.

  • The restore prong of our model addresses the need for community-building to heal cross-racial wounds and fuel collective action. One strand of this work creates opportunities for people to engage in meaningful cross-racial interactions. We hold community events, such as block parties, lunches, and celebrations, that allow people to experience shared joy with people of other races. These interactions heal divides, build familiarity, and fight against dehumanizing forces, including anti-Asian and anti-Black stereotypes.

    We build upon cross-racial healing to further cross-racial solidarity. Programs in this area directly discuss community issues, current events, and historical developments. They are usually more intensive commitments for community members because they may touch upon heavier subjects or involve attending multiple sessions. Examples of programs include restorative justice trainings, exchanges between staff of community-based organizations that serve different racial communities, and youth-led workshops on anti-AAPI hate and gender-based violence.

    In addition to cross-racial community-building, we believe that general community-building is crucial for community safety. When we think about times when we feel safe, we think about when our loved ones and neighbors came to our aid. We think about the warmth that friendly, familiar faces and a sense of belonging in our day-to-day lives. We cultivate trusted community leaders who can be relied on in times of need, hold events to strengthen ties between neighbors, and help community members learn empathy and conflict navigation skills. With improved conflict navigation skills, community members may even be able to transform conflict into opportunities for greater interpersonal understanding and healing.

    The last strand of our restore prong brings community members together to raise our voices. We organize public events to bring government and elected officials face-to-face with community members, providing translation so that policymakers can hear the concerns and opinions of our community. We also bring community members and provide translation to events held by other community organizations to discuss community issues and identify solutions. Finally, we hold internal listening sessions and engagements to ensure that our work is aligned with community needs.

  • The reform prong of our model seeks to align resources and public policies with our holistic vision of community safety. We analyze emerging policy proposals to assess whether policies will achieve their aims and whether there will be unintended consequences to inform our coalition and partner organizations’ responses to policy proposals. We engage in policy and budget advocacy to align resources at the community, city, and state level. These activities can range from driving policy campaigns to facilitating community member public comment to advising on policies for our government partners. Once we achieve policy wins, we track the implementation of policies and programs to ensure effectiveness and accountability.

Our Model of Collaboration

We have chosen to tackle the immense and complicated challenge of enacting a holistic and equitable vision of community safety. CCSJ partner organizations and the coalition as a whole bring several ingredients and techniques that have been essential to our successes.

Essential Ingredients

  • CCSJ feels a strong sense of accountability to community members at the grassroots level. Whether it is with low-income Chinese immigrants or youth throughout the city, each organization already worked directly with community members as part of its core mission prior to the formation of CCSJ and has decades of trust and credibility with their communities. Our direct engagement means we understand the nuances of community perspectives and needs, which inform our strategies. We also recognize that our staff’s views may differ from some of the views of our community members, but we prioritize engaging in dialogue and meeting people where they are.

  • Trust between partners has been built through decades of working together and strengthened through working together in crises as part of CCSJ. Cultivating personal bonds has been especially helpful at the senior leadership and executive director levels. Each organization also knows that each partner is ultimately dedicated to serving the needs of community members, not to serve an ideological agenda or for political gain. There have been moments that could have ignited conflict, such as external actors highlighting one coalition member and detracting others. However, each of the organizations trusts each other and are willing to uplift each other’s work.

  • In this complex and sensitive environment where crises can erupt quickly, it is important to stay coordinated with trusted organizations in the ecosystem. CCSJ’s partner organizations bring perspectives and expertise on different safety-related issues that individual partners may not have. It helps each partner organization be more aware of the overall landscape and the coalition take a holistic approach to safety. For example, one organization can share their analysis of potential impacts of a piece of community safety legislation, which would not otherwise be formally analyzed by the other organizations. CCSJ partner organizations can then be more prepared to navigate changes in the political and policy landscape that might affect programmatic work.

  • CCSJ partners routinely hire people with bilingual capacity, who have grown up in San Francisco, and/or have spent a significant amount of time living or working in the city. This is especially important for community safety initiatives because trust and understanding are necessary for navigating these heavy and sensitive topics. Staff with language capacity, cultural competence, and a deep familiarity with San Francisco will have advantages in building relationships with community members and external program partners, as well as creating programs that are responsive to the specifics of different cultures and contexts.

  • The complex and highly political nature of community safety means that a coalition must be respected by government offices, elected officials, and community members to be effective. Each CCSJ partner holds different relationships with different stakeholders. We leverage our combined relationships to call meetings with people in power and organize community events.

  • The complex and sensitive nature of community safety work can create difficult political pressures, often out of one’s control. Each organization’s commitment to long-term change, helps the coalition take a long-term view on improving community safety. CCSJ recognizes that it must weather political storms and stay focused on building safety infrastructure that is responsive to our community’s needs.

Key Techniques

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Coalition Infrastructure

Many coalitions are focused on a single, well-defined issue, such as passing or implementing a specific law. On the other hand, CCSJ is focused on a broad issue that touches many policies and programs. This section describes the coalition infrastructure we used to coordinate and take collective action.

Figure X. CCSJ Structure

    • Steering Committee: The CCSJ Steering Committee is composed of at least one leader in each partner organization and the Coalition Director. 

    • Coalition Director: The Coalition Director facilitates communication and strategic planning for CCSJ. The Coalition Director also serves as the main point of contact for external stakeholders, manages relationships with elected officials and policymakers at the coalition-level, and drives the creation of joint statements and responses to urgent items.

    • Evaluation Manager: The Evaluation Manager works with leaders and program staff across CCSJ partner organizations to understand CCSJ’s vision of success and develop evaluations to measure and document outcomes.

    • Dedicated Program Staff: In addition to incorporating new CCSJ work into existing staff work plans, each organization has hired dedicated positions for CCSJ work.

    • Foundational strategy meetings: A necessary step in forming the coalition was to discuss everyone’s goals for the coalition and theories of change. From there we could identify common goals and strategies to pursue collectively. Another important step was to address any potential conflicts or misgivings that the organizations may have, so that they could be addressed before making major investments into the coalition.

    • Steering Committee meetings: Leaders from each organization meet biweekly to coordinate actions, share information, and make collective decisions. Engagement from executive directors, program directors, and other leadership empowers the Steering Committee to make high-level decisions within a highly politicized environment.

    • Rapid response protocol: In the early phases of CCSJ, we had a more reactive approach because we were focused on addressing every incident as quickly as possible. We were constantly concerned about missing the window. However, this approach was not sustainable and took energy away from building community safety infrastructure and longer-term change. To help us prioritize our efforts, we created a rapid response protocol that outlined criteria for activating different responses to incidents. The protocol sharpened our understanding of our role and the kinds of interventions we were best suited to make.

    • Strengthened internal communication channels: Over the years, CCSJ has built additional communication channels to facilitate collaboration. We created a listserv for Steering Committee members and adjacent staff to collaborate on coalition-level decisions. We also created a listserv for program staff to share resources and updates. 

    • Theory of change: After several years of crisis response and building new programming, we came back together to document our theory of change. We conducted one-on-one interviews with CCSJ member staff, pored through our documents, and conducted a workshop with staff at the executive and frontline levels. Working through this process was an opportunity for us to strengthen the unifying threads of our work and incorporate the lessons learned from our early years. The workshop was also an opportunity for CCSJ at different organizations and levels to hear from one another and build greater understanding.

  • Due to capacity constraints, we could not build all of the infrastructure that we thought would be helpful. We recommend considering the following:

    • Administrative support: The administrative work required for a funded coalition with multiple grant requirements is complex. Some grant requirements were so onerous that they started to negatively impact programs and relationships. Additional administrative support, especially for grant management, could free up capacity among program staff to focus on implementation.

    • Social events: Social events to bring staff at all levels together can build familiarity and seed collaborations across the coalition. Staff can learn about the details of each other’s work and better understand each other’s motivations in a way that might not come out of focused work meetings. Social events also build social cohesion, especially for staff that may have come on board more recently.

    • Continued strategy retreats: As the environment around community safety changes, it is useful to have regular meetings dedicated to revisiting strategies and remapping the stakeholder landscape.