Beyond Awareness: Changing the Story to Change the Future of Community Violence Intervention

By Fatimah Loren Dreier, Executive Director, the HAVI

Every day across the country, survivors, violence intervention professionals, hospital teams, outreach workers, and community leaders are exercising innovative ways to prevent violence before it happens. These are credible messenger that prove what we in the field know so well; those closest to the challenge are also closest to the solution. They are interrupting cycles of retaliation, helping survivors heal, connecting people to jobs and counseling, and rebuilding trust where it has too often been broken.

That is why the launch of the Ad Council's newest Agree to Agree campaign is so important.

The campaign does more than raise awareness. It helps the public see something they rarely have the opportunity to witness: the lifesaving work happening every day through community violence intervention. Through a series of powerful public service announcements and educational resources, the campaign introduces audiences to the trusted professionals and community leaders who are helping prevent violence before it occurs. Developed with input from practitioners across the country, these stories reflect the lived experiences, expertise, and humanity of the people closest to the work.

For too long, public conversations about violence have focused almost exclusively on what happens after a tragedy.

What we don't often see are the moments that prevented someone from picking up a firearm. The violence prevention professional who de-escalated a conflict. The hospital responder who met a survivor at one of the most vulnerable moments of their life and helped them begin healing instead of retaliation.

Those stories matter and we are partnering with the Ad Council to tell that story.

Changing public understanding is not separate from preventing violence—it is essential to that public health approach to building safer communities.

At the HAVI, we have spent the past year working alongside community leaders, hospitals, survivors, researchers, foundations, and national partners to better understand how we shift the narrative around community violence intervention.

That means elevating credible messengers. It means ensuring that survivors, violence prevention professionals, hospital responders, and community leaders have opportunities to tell their own stories in their own voices. It means recognizing lived experience as expertise. And it means helping the public understand that the people closest to the problem are often the ones leading the solutions.

The Agree to Agree campaign is one important step in that broader effort to elevate credible messengers.

The PSAs will run in donated media, including television, digital, social and out-of-home placements nationally and with a focus on cities where CVI is most active. For more information about this campaign and to see the PSA, please visit AgreeToAgree.org/Safety.