Grant for Community Violence Intervention Center
Film by Passenger Productions.
The Community Violence Intervention Center (CVIC) serves as a catalyst offering energy, momentum and vision toward ending violence in the Greater Grand Forks area. CVIC offers services that provide a lifeline to safety and foster healing and empowerment for individuals impacted by violence — regardless of geography or cultural community. CVIC works to end violence by providing healthy relationship education and other efforts to move its community from violence to vibrance.
In 2010, CVIC brought together a coalition of organizations — many of which had not previously worked together — to create a plan that would move the community closer to ending violence. The result of this effort was Safer Tomorrows, an unprecedented collaboration of 40+ organizations to prevent childhood exposure to violence in Grand Forks County. Today, all K-12 public and private schools and Head Start pre-schools across in Grand Forks County have integrated anti-bullying curriculum and violence prevention education, and provide immediate access to therapeutic and support services. This comprehensive community-powered approach is creating the potential to truly build a culture of intolerance for violence and bullying behavior in our schools.
In many ways, Safer Tomorrows was born out of groundwork and connections that CVIC has built through 15 years of providing emergency services, coordinated community response teams, community education, and prevention. Building interagency partnerships and community collaboratives have been a hallmark of CVIC’s work since the beginning. That experience helped CVIC foster deep connections among the Safer Tomorrows partners. These connections fueled the effort to secure the resources relationships necessary to make Safer Tomorrows a success in Grand Forks and the model for creating community-driven approach to address childhood violence.
