Respond, Restore, Reform:
A three-pronged approach
Credit: Asian Pacific Environmental Network
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:
Respond, which address immediate needs while centering victims and survivors of harm
Restore, which focuses on community empowerment, community-building and cross-racial solidarity
Reform, which aims to strengthen public safety systems
Respond: Centering victims and survivors of harm
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.
Restore: Community empowerment, community-building and cross-racial solidarity
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.
Reform: Strengthening public safety systems
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.
