Praxis International

Praxis has earned a national reputation for innovative and survivor-focused approaches to working with communities, organizations, and institutions to promote justice and end gender-based violence. Since 1998 Praxis has implemented comprehensive and targeted technical assistance projects for the u. s. department of justice, office on violence against women (ovw) for their grantees in various grant programs as well as communities and organizations around the country. The primary focus of Praxis's work is to teach social change advocacy while supporting system's reform, and strengthening community responses to survivors of gender-based violence. As a national training, consulting, and technical assistance provider, Praxis has worked with thousands of people and hundreds of communities seeking to respond to and end gender-based violence in rural, tribal, suburban, and urban communities. Praxis employs a wide range of strategies to share innovations and change conditions that produce injustice including training workshops, seminars, practice labs, webinars, and distance learning featuring national experts and peer-to-peer dialogues; roundtables convened to delve deep into issues and foster creative thinking; comprehensive tool kits to help apply new approaches step-by-step; emerging issue think pieces; conference presentations; and a website rich with free materials. For over twenty-five years, Praxis has conducted dozens of on-site consultations throughout the country; trained more than 12,000 people, provided more than 500 advocacy and criminal justice reform trainings; conducted over 100 safety and accountability audits in partnership with local communities; and produced numerous training and ta resources including online training courses, public awareness campaigns, needs assessments, organizing manuals, training guides, and comprehensive training toolkits. Our current projects include the advocacy learning center, the institutional analysis program, and the strengthening rural advocacy project. The advocacy learning center is a comprehensive project to build knowledge and skills for effective, high-quality individual, institutional, and community advocacy on behalf of all survivors of gender-based violence. The advocacy learning center is a national project in partnership with the u.s. office on violence against women, and a host of other minnesota-based and national advocates and trainers. Teams of advocates and their agency leaders from dozens of states, tribal nations, and u.s territories come together to listen, share, learn, teach, debate, and celebrate together throughout an 18-month course. Alc participants delve deep into core values and principles of advocacy in an initial immersion training; think and plan together about changing cultural conditions that generate gender-based violence at a community advocacy training; then examine how we can reshape institutions to protect women and children in a systems reform training institute. The teams explore the topics most important to them through remote learning, webinars, and dialogue with model social justice organizations around the country-- all towards strengthening advocacy organizations to create fundamental social change. Since 2009, more than 900 advocates and 400 advocacy groups have participated in the alc. The strengthening rural advocacy (sra) project builds the capacity of non- profit advocacy programs across the country to respond effectively to the needs of survivors of sexual assault, domestic violence, dating violence, and stalking in rural communities across the country. This program provides technical assistance and training to office on violence against women rural grantees, and others, to support their coordinated community responses (ccr) to violence against women; to strengthen advocacy leadership in creating system change and individual advocacy skills; and also provides centralized, coordinated rural-specific technical assistance information. The sra supports rural advocacy programs to self-reflect and conduct organizational assessments to enhance their capacity to engage in social change advocacy. In addition to providing ongoing training, technical assistance and consulting for rural grantees, Praxis maintains a rural clearinghouse and distributes a newsletter to rural community programs. Praxis's rural programming has trained more than 12,000 individuals in rural areas through national conferences, training institutes, roundtables, and webinars. The institutional analysis (ia) program supports communities to assess and improve institutional responses to cases of gender-based violence via community assessments, best-practice assessments and safety and accountability audits of local criminal justice, child welfare or other institutional response to battering. To date we have delivered over 500 training hours for more than 3000 people, as well as 2000 hours of tailored guidance to communities about their institutional analysis projects. Praxis has also provided more than 6500 hours of training and tailored guidance to ovw grantees and other communities implementing the blueprint for safety model and/or considering adopting the model. The ia methodology can be used to address sexual assault, domestic violence, dating violence, stalking and other forms of gender violence for programs and communities who engage in institutional change work. Praxis offers communities a method of institutional analysis and change rooted in the field of sociology called institutional ethnography. Praxis provides consulting and technical assistance for communities across the country and conducts community assessment institutes where participants get hands-on practice developing skills in interviewing, focus group facilitation, and text analysis.