A California Funder Backs a Unique Approach to Ending Domestic Violence: Getting Men Involved

A new program funded by the Blue Shield of California Foundation and administered by the Alliance for Boys and Men of Color (ABMoC) has attracted more than 80 partners to take a unique approach to treating and preventing domestic violence.

The campaign, called “Healing Together,” is creating opportunities for men’s groups to join with the traditionally women-run world of intimate partner violence prevention. In a leap beyond expecting men to take responsibility for their role in preventing this violence, though, Healing Together is working on two other fronts. The first is coordinating and supporting groups to help men heal from systemic racism and other traumas that can cause them to act out violently, and the second is building an alliance, including these groups, to remove domestic violence from the sphere of law enforcement whenever possible.

It’s a different approach to a deeply entrenched societal problem. Intimate partner violence was first addressed as a potentially criminal offense in the mid-1800s. The first feminists’ rally to raise awareness of violence against women, including domestic violence, was held in 1970, and the first Conference on Battered Women, in Wisconsin, was held in 1976.

But despite what has been an over 100-year battle to end intimate partner violence, the results are objectively abysmal. Roughly half of all incidents aren’t reported to the police—and of the victims who did call law enforcement, 75% said that police involvement either had “no impact” or made them “less safe.” Current approaches like mandatory arrest of perpetrators and “batterer intervention programs” haven’t increased victims’ safety. Meanwhile, generations of boys and girls alike grow up witnessing this violence as an example of what family life looks like. In California alone, nearly one in five children has been a witness to intimate partner violence.

Private funding to prevent the intimate partner violence epidemic is comparatively miniscule. A recent search of Candid’s Foundation Directory Online found 74 organizations coded as grantors domestic violence-related programs, of which only 49 were accepting applications. For comparison, a similar search of organizations that fund animal welfare found 5,000 grantmakers currently taking applications, out of more than 18,000 total.

In this environment, Blue Shield of California Foundation’s consistent, decades-long commitment to funding domestic violence prevention—and this new step to fund treatment and support for offenders as well as victims—makes the organization a, if not the, funding leader in this field.

Originally established in 1981 and funding mostly in California, the foundation lists “breaking the cycle of domestic violence” as the first of its three main priorities for funding. In 2018, it gave four of its largest six grants to domestic violence-related organizations. In September alone, the foundation announced $3.4 million in grants dedicated to breaking the cycle of domestic violence, giving more than $1 million of those funds to the Healing Together Campaign through a multiyear grant. This is Blue Shield’s first partnership to engage men of color in ending intimate partner violence.

The campaign was initiated by PolicyLink, a national research and advocacy group that focuses on racial and economic equity, through the Alliance for Boys and Men of Color, a network of more than 200 organizations and community leaders that originated in California and has since expanded to a national scope. PolicyLink launched the network back in 2011, and continues to coordinate the effort. Organizers decided to start Healing Together after looking deeply into what they could do about “inter-communal violence,” according to PolicyLink Managing Director Marc Philpart.

Philpart said his organization discovered that “the issues related to inter-communal violence really began in the home,” a realization that, in hindsight, is not at all surprising.

“As you peel back the layers of the onion, we started to understand all the ways in which patriarchy, misogyny and these ways in which we’re socialized in this country contribute to violent behavior,” Philpart told Inside Philanthropy.

At the same time, Philpart said, as a racial justice organization working for substantive overall reforms of California’s criminal justice system, ABMoC wanted to create a program within a racial justice framework while taking into account the needs of everyone impacted by intimate partner violence—survivors, families experiencing harm, and the people causing that harm.

The question that led to Healing Together, Philpart said, was “how can all of those individuals be part of the solution to further healing and the transformation of systems to ensure that not only boys and men of color, but their families and communities are healing and thriving?”

Well before launching Healing Together in 2019, ABMoC spent several years building relationships with organizations that were already working on the issue.

“The California Partnership to End Domestic Violence has been a really strong partner to us, helping us learn and understand the issue,” while also being open to learning and understanding the racial justice implications in Healing Together’s approach, said Sybil Grant, a senior associate at PolicyLink who has been heavily involved in organizing the initiative.

“We come to this space very, very humbly,” Grant said, acknowledging the organizations that “have been doing this work for decades, life-saving work.”

“We don’t claim to have all the answers of how to resolve violence,” she added, but instead, want to “encourage folks and bring them together,” to get at the root causes of violence and come up with solutions that “don’t depend on state violence as a mechanism to end partner violence.”

In addition to bringing together such a large group of diverse organizations to address intimate partner violence and providing support to organizations using treatment, not punishment, to address intimate partner violence, ABMoC and PolicyLink, along with 11 other organizations, were co-sponsors of AB 2054, the CRISES Act, which was ultimately vetoed by Gov. Gavin Newsom after sailing through California’s legislature with a near-unanimous vote.

While Newsom supported the bill’s premise to divert funding away from law enforcement and into trial treatment programs for offenders, Grant said the governor’s issue was that the proposed program was situated in the Office of Emergency Services. Given the already heavy burden of the COVID epidemic, Newsom felt strongly the initiative belonged in a different department. The bill has been revived as AB 118, and “we’re talking about what other kind of department can house this critical program,” Grant said.

The new bill isn’t just critical; it’s timely, according to a preliminary analysis by the National Institutes of Health of the potential impact of the pandemic and related stressors on incidents of domestic violence. Even “this cursory analysis,” according to the study, “illustrates that stay-at-home orders may create a worst-case scenario for individuals suffering from [domestic violence].”

At this point, Healing Together’s only funder is Blue Shield of California Foundation, and it’s unclear if others will get on board. But getting men involved and using a racial justice and healing framework to work with men is a compelling strategy for tackling a problem that negatively impacts a huge segment of the population—both in its goal of moving the problem out of the realm of policing, and addressing the root causes of violence. One thing is certain: Whether it’s support for this particular campaign or other efforts underway, this is a cause that warrants far greater attention from philanthropy.

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