From college campuses to youth groups, YWCA Richmond’s prevention team uses education as a tool to empower key stakeholders in our community’s well-being and to eradicate violence before it occurs.

What is Prevention?

Sexual and Intimate Partner Violence Prevention is stopping violence before it has occurred. Prevention strives to create change with interventions at individual, relational, community, and societal levels. Strategies for sexual and intimate partner violence prevention can look like promoting social norms that protect against violence, teaching skills that promote healthy relationships and healthy sexuality, and creating protective environments in our communities.

Our Prevention Programs

YWCA Richmond works with schools and community partners to provide violence prevention education to children, teens, young adults, and families. We use evidence-based and evidence-informed curricula to create effective, interactive, and relevant programs.

Currently, we offer workshops on a variety of topics to give youth basic skills and knowledge or longer programs for youth to dive deeper to help change behaviors and norms.

Single session workshops help individuals gain basic skills and knowledge. Topics covered in these workshops include Teen Dating Violence, Bullying Awareness & Prevention, Healthy Relationships, and basic Bystander Intervention.

Our multi-session programs help youth dive deeper into root causes of violence to ultimately change behaviors and norms. We offer different evidence-based and evidence-informed programs including:

  • Safe Dates: Evidence-based program that raises awareness of healthy and abusive dating relationships and the causes and consequences of abusive relationships. Provides skills and resources to help themselves or friends and develop healthy dating habits. Available in four, six, or ten fifty minute sessions.
  • DO YOU: Through creative expression, this evidence-informed program addresses violence by confronting root causes, challenging risk factors, and building resilience to promote positive development and healthy relationships. Available in ten one hour or one and a half hour sessions or can be adjusted to your availability
  • Shifting Boundaries: Middle school evidence-based program that utilizes school-wide and classroom lesson interventions to reduce dating violence and sexual harassment by highlighting consequences for perpetrators and increasing faculty surveillance. Available in six sessions over 6-9 weeks and three school-wide interventions throughout the year.

If your group would like a specific topic or program, we are able to tailor our programs to your school or organization’s needs.

Empower RVA Teens

Empower RVA Teens is YWCA’s youth-led Teen Peer Education program for high school-aged teens that aims to prevent teen dating violence and sexual assault by empowering teens to teach their peers about healthy relationships, teen dating violence, sexual violence, and consent. Learn more about Empower RVA Teens and how to apply here.

Contact Us

If you are interested in learning more about YWCA Richmond’s prevention programming, please contact Robin Sawyer at rsawyer@ywcarichmond.org or 804.643.6761 ext 150.