The Partnership, the brain trust, and the activists working to end domestic violence

This week, I’m posting another conversation I had with Erin Scott – Board Chair of the California Partnership to End Domestic Violence. As we allude to in our conversation, she is also the Executive Director of the Family Violence Law Center, which is based in Oakland, CA.

Today’s conversation is related to last week’s chat that I had with Erin about The Partnership’s effort to double funding for domestic violence, which would allow for more prevention efforts in California. It’s also a follow up to the conversation we had a while back with Beth Hassett, the CEO and Executive Director of WEAVE, and the work that they do with coalitions, including The Partnership. We talked, in a broad sense, about the work The Partnership does to achieve its vision of “a California free of domestic violence.”

In addition to the coalition work that The Partnership does with its members all across California, they lean on and assist other ally organizations that don’t necessarily work on domestic violence issues but do work on issues that overlap with domestic violence like sexual assault, immigration, employment law, economic security, and many other issues. When thinking about useful tools to change public policy with, a brain trust of other experts that know the issues that overlap with yours inside and out is a very good tool to have.

The other thing that stands out to me about how The Partnership works is that their approach to public policy is designed to minimize unintended negative consequences of policies aimed at eradicating domestic violence. The process by which The Partnership does this is by pulling in input from their members all over California, which helps ensure that its policy decisions don’t inadvertently hurt some of its members. Erin said it better than I did,

One of the great things about that amount of input is … my agency is in Oakland, and something that might be very beneficial to my agency in Oakland might have a negative impact in a rural area that I might not think of if it was just me on the phone giving that input to The Partnership.”

It’s this balancing act that The Partnership pulls off – balancing the need and conditions of its member agencies and the domestic violence survivors that they serve – between the urban and rural parts of the state that I find special.

To learn more about CPEDV, please visit their website and specifically, their page on their policy priorities.

To keep up to date with the work The Partnership is doing, you can check out their page on Facebook and you can follow them on Twitter, @cpedvcoalition.

You can also follow Erin’s organization on Facebook and Twitter, @FamilyVLC.