Priorities for Year Two
Year One focused on expanding the platform for primary prevention in Victoria and building the evidence base on what works. Going forward, we will focus on building and expanding on the programs, initiatives and partnerships we know will deliver results, as we build further evidence.
Activities already underway in Year Two are critical to maintain the momentum generated in Year One and begin to realise longer-term behaviour and attitudinal change. These activities will bolster the evidence base to inform future scale up options in primary prevention.
We will continue to strengthen prevention systems and structures and maintain partnerships across government and the sector, building on the pivotal role of Respect Victoria, to ensure effective coordination of primary prevention activity from a whole of systems approach. We will strengthen governance, and continue to support the capacity and capability of the prevention workforce, women’s health services and in diverse community organisations.
There will be concerted efforts in Year Two towards evaluation, underpinned by the finalised Free from Violence Monitoring and Evaluation Framework. Evaluation findings will be used to build the evidence base and inform potential scale up options or new initiatives. We will prepare and support our delivery partners to monitor and evaluate their programs under this framework, which will be critical to informing future work under Free from Violence and opportunities for scale up. By the end of Year Two, we will have a better understanding of which prevention approaches are effective and how we can target future investment to have the most impact.
In Year Two, we will continue to build the evidence base on what works to address family violence and all forms of violence against women in a range of different communities by supporting innovative community-led primary prevention projects. We have extended funding for innovative, community-led primary prevention initiatives (including those under the Free from Violence and Aboriginal Family Violence Primary Prevention Innovation Funds, as well as those with culturally, linguistically and religiously diverse communities) to strengthen our understanding of what works to prevent violence in different communities and contexts.
We will also prepare for scale up of promising primary prevention initiatives by applying what we have learnt works to prevent violence in different settings and in different communities, founded on the evidence we’ve built. Scale up will be informed by continued activity and the findings of evaluations in Year Two.
Respect Victoria will lead and drive action to research and evaluate and engage and communicate with the community. Respect Victoria will continue to coordinate and collaborate to bring researchers, practitioners, funders, champions and advocates together in one concerted effort to drive primary prevention of all forms of family violence and violence against women.
Respect Victoria will also continue to deliver on initiatives outlined in the Respect Victoria Strategic Plan 2019-2022. It is expected that in early 2020 Respect Victoria will deliver a behaviour change campaign targeting family violence experienced by LGBTIQ people. Further waves of both the Respect Women: ‘Call it out’ and Respect Older People: ‘Call it Out’ campaigns are also expected to be delivered, to reinforce the messaging and results of earlier campaigns.
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