Assessing ICASA's Capacity to Advance Primary Prevention - The Illinois Coalition Against Sexual Assault (ICASA) aims to reduce the rate of sexual violence, particularly in Illinois communities disproportionately burdened with high rates of SV and reduce inequities in social and structural determinant of health (SDOH) that impact disparities in sexual violence rates. ICASA will achieve this by using statewide, health equity focused, data-driven, community- and societal-level primary prevention strategies. The effort will include four main components: a) building infrastructure for sexual violence prevention; b) collaborating with the state health department to enhance State Action Plan (SAP); c) implementing sexual violence prevention approaches; and d) using data to inform action. ICASA will implement three sexual violence prevention approaches that advance health equity and reduce disparities in specific SDOH, with a focus on implementation at the community and societal levels. These approaches include a) strengthening economic supports for women and non-binary people of color by developing, implementing, and sharing anti-racist hiring practices for ICASA which incorporate family-friendly workplace policies, supporting livable wages, and addressing pay disparities; b) creating protective environments by supporting the implementation of Illinois public policy which will align with prevention, improves organizational environments, and where Illinois Rape Crisis Centers are likely implementors or partners including specific supports for implementation in rural communities; and c) promoting social norms that protect against violence through i) training and technical assistance on combining relationship-level approaches with social norms campaigns, ii) increasing Rape Crisis Center access to evidence-based prevention resources in Spanish and Arabic, and iii) hosting a training series led by populations at the greatest risk of sexual violence, such as sexual and gender minorities and people with disabilities, to ensure social norm efforts include and do not further marginalize these individuals from these communities. Data driven decision making and ongoing evaluation are core components of this work. ICASA will work with an evaluator to enhance ICASA Rape Crisis Center health-equity focused approach to local level prevention planning, where each center is responsible to use the public health approach to assess community need, then select target populations, risk and protective factors, and strategies to address those needs. Many Rape Crisis Centers lack the resources to complete community assessments using local data, therefore, the evaluator will develop community-level data reports for each Rape Crisis Center based on their service areas to develop prevention plans and track data changes over the grant cycle.
