Outreach to Underserved Communities

This curriculum is designed to help domestic violence programs reach out to underserved communities in order to address the issues of diversity and of the limited access to quality services for battered women from those communities. This curriculum has an Introduction and five modules titled: 1. "Unraveling What We Know", 2. "The Threads", 3. "Begin to Weave", 4. "Kinks in the Weave", and 5. "Those Difficult Issues". Its appendices include handouts and worksheets for participants and overheads and readings for trainers. It is structured as a two day training and is designed for a program rather than individuals, the curriculum Introduction lists conditions a program must commit to if the training is to be undertaken.

Appendix D includes a working discussion paper titled "Achieving Effective Domestic Violence Public Education In A Diverse Society: A Solution Oriented Aproach", by Sujata Warrier & Vickii Coffey as preparatory reading for the trainers. This working discussion paper includes sections on: human rights frameworks, concepts and definitions around culture, diversity, ethnicity, and systemic oppressions, examples of common errors in cross-cultural interactions including omission, tokenism, and exclusion, and an example of diversifying a Board for the wrong reasons. The last section provides practical guidelines and examples that move towards social change.

This curriculum is created as part of the Building Comprehensive Solutions to Domestic Violence (BCSDV) initiative. BCSDV started its national training initiative in an effort to enable domestic violence organizations to play a broader collaborative role in the community. The three interrelated training curricula were developed to build on each other, although each can stand alone as a teaching unit. Each curriculum contains an introductory discussion of the materal, a suggested schedule, material to be copied as transparencies for overhead projectors, handouts to be duplicated for participants, and substantive discussion of each section for the trainer.

The other two training curricula are: curriculum #1 - Introduction to Policy Advocacy and Analysis: Improving How Systems Respond to Battered Women by Jill Davies, and curriculum #3 - Skills for Successful Collaborations by Day Piercy.

Building Comprehensive Solutions to Domestic Violence (BCSDV) is an initiative of the National Resource Center on Domestic Violence (NRC).