SHARED SAFETY: Transforming Philadelphia's Response to Relational Violence
Our systems-change work is focused on ensuring people experiencing relationship violence receive the interventions they need to be safe.
Shared Safety is Philadelphia's coordinated community response to domestic and sexual violence, human trafficking and reproductive coercion. Through Shared Safety, the City's service providers and government representatives have come together to pursue a shared commitment to making system-level change. Together, we have established a strategic plan to create a more effective city-wide response to domestic violence. This plan will:
- ensure domestic violence-informed screening and access to services
- embed domestic violence-informed practices into human service agencies
- expand capacity for emergency housing
- establish a system that allows for safety, self-reliance, and wellbeing
- assure people who act abusively are offered alternatives to violence
Women Against Abuse and its partners are now working to implement these goals to create a truly coordinated community response to domestic violence in Philadelphia!
Watch this video about Shared Safety!
From the beginning, Women Against Abuse has provided vital leadership, staff resources, fundraising, and coordination for Shared Safety. Between 2012 and 2018, Women Against Abuse was a co-backbone organization for the effort, along with the Department of Behavioral Health and Intellectual disAbilities Services. Today, Philadelphia's Office of Domestic Violence Strategies is the primary backbone of Shared Safety, led by Azucena Ugarte, Women Against Abuse's former Director of Prevention, Education and Technical Assistance. Women Against Abuse continues to provide leadership as one of three co-chairs.
Stakeholders from nearly 60 organizations meet quarterly to make decisions, share learning, and provide a forum for discussion and collaboration. Already, Shared Safety has had some important results, including commitments from public stakeholders to begin to change the way they collect data and information, to be trained, and to publicly articulate their support for survivors. Shared Safety was also pivotal in the establishment of a central office to address domestic violence in Philadelphia by Mayor Jim Kenney in 2016.
No other major metropolitan area in the U.S. has an approach at the scale and depth that this plan advances. Philadelphia can lead the way!
