Why Close to Home?

Close to Home is engaging the Fields Corner neighborhood in Dorchester (Boston, MA) —including youth, family, friends, neighbors, civic leaders, and organizational partners—to place a priority on responding to and preventing domestic violence in our community.  Close to Home focuses on prevention and placing responsibility for dealing with domestic violence in the hands of the community itself, engaging women, men and youth in the process.

Close to Home creates opportunities for people and organizations to:

• Learn about domestic violence in their community,
• Discuss and reflect on domestic violence in their lives and communities,
• Develop skills to respond to and prevent domestic violence,
• Develop and implement solutions to domestic violence, and
•  Build strong meaningful connections with each other.

AN INNOVATIVE APPROACH
Close to Home believes that preventing domestic violence requires the work of all community members to change the attitudes and beliefs surrounding violence in families and relationships — transforming attitudes and beliefs that condone and perpetuate violence to those that honor and celebrate respectful, healthy relationships.  We believe that when youth, community residents, civic groups, and organizational and institutional partners come together, we are working to transform those norms every day.

We recognize where people first turn for support in their life, and are helping to build family, friends, and neighbors' capacity to play a leadership role in domestic violence prevention.

We are working with a multi-ethnic community to define the problem of domestic violence and develop strategies for changing social norms and providing support to family, friends and neighbors while building on cultural strengths.

We are working with existing social networks and community organizations to take part in the process of talking about and problem solving around domestic violence.

We conduct community assessments that identify leadership capacity, highlight strong relationships between residents and community based organizations, and identify how the community has practiced coming together to generate solutions for other problems.  We leverage these strengths to respond to and prevent domestic violence.

We collaborate with organizational and institutional partners to help them realize the impact of domestic violence on their constituents and the community, and to create additional supports for those living with violence.

We are mobilizing community strengths and integrating domestic violence prevention into the community through presentations at civic events, partnerships with community agencies and developing the leadership capacity of local residents.

OUR SPIRIT OF ORGANIZING
Because the issue of domestic violence lies close to people’s hearts, we believe that working around this issue requires a unique “spirit”, or way of being. The following are some principles that we instill in all areas of our work to create connection and build relationships with people.  We believe that those connections and relationships are fundamental to the success of preventing domestic violence.

Our Spirit of Organizing includes:

• Creating a welcoming, comforting, nurturing, and safe space for people
• Creating a space for laughter
• Building on strengths
• Recognizing that every individual has something to offer to the cause
• Working from a place of hope and optimism
• Taking time to build relationships with people
• Meeting people where they are—both physically and emotionally
• Respecting all viewpoints and opinions
• Responding to differing viewpoints with elaborating questions, and a genuine curiosity to learn more

DV AS A ROOT CAUSE ISSUE
Close to Home believes that domestic violence is an important social justice and root cause issue.  As a root cause issue, we recognize the important interconnections between domestic violence happening at home, and the more public types of violence that are perpetuated in our community.  These different types of violence include street violence, youth violence, gang violence, low academic performance, and poor social development, just to name a few.  As a social justice issue, domestic violence is allowed to continue in an environment that also struggles with racism, sexism, and classism, among others.  We believe that by working on the issue of domestic violence prevention, we are working to effect change in all of these other forms of violence.