The AVERT HARM empowerment lens into your own work, whether you’re in community outreach, education, healthcare, or systems leadership:
Bringing the AVERT HARM Empowerment Lens into Practice
The AVERT HARM Framework offers more than a method—it offers a mindset. At its core is empowerment: the belief that individuals and communities can recognize harm early, respond effectively, and reshape systems to protect dignity and life. Integrating this lens into our work means shifting from reactive care to proactive resilience.
🔑 Key Empowerment Strategies Using AVERT HARM
- Equip Every Role with Tools
- Use AVERT’s role-specific tracks to train not just professionals, but peers, parents, educators, and frontline workers.
- Empower people to act confidently with clear, life-support-style protocols—like CPR for harm.
- Name the Unspoken
- Apply the H.A.R.M.™ Typology (Hidden, Acute, Relational, Missed) to help people identify harm they’ve felt but couldn’t articulate.
- Create safe spaces for naming and mapping harm in families, schools, clinics, and communities.
- Activate Community Networks
- Launch peer-led workshops using AVERT’s Community & Frontline track.
- Build harm response teams that include youth, elders, and culturally grounded leaders.
- Embed Empowerment in Systems
- Use AVERT’s Systems Leadership tools to redesign workflows, policies, and surveillance systems.
- Shift institutions from passive service delivery to active harm prevention.
- Center Lived Experience
- Integrate trauma-informed communication and cultural humility into every layer of engagement.
- Elevate voices of those most impacted by harm to co-lead strategy and evaluation.
🛠 Implementation Ideas
- Host “HARM Mapping” sessions in schools, clinics, or community centers.
- Train youth leaders in AVERT’s empowerment tools to lead peer support circles.
- Embed AVERT protocols into intake forms, crisis response plans, and staff training.
- Partner with local government to pilot AVERT-informed harm surveillance and policy reform.
Empowerment isn’t just a value—it’s a strategy. With AVERT HARM, we can move from isolated interventions to coordinated resilience, and from surviving harm to transforming it.
