Minnesota Indian Women's Sexual Assault Coalition's Sexual Violence Prevention Project - The Minnesota Indian Women’s Sexual Assault Coalition (MIWSAC) is a designated Tribal Coalition under VAWA 2022 and 34 U.S.C. 12291. It also holds non-profit status as a 501c3 organization. The purpose of this Rape Prevention and Education (RPE) project is to enhance MIWSAC’s capacity to engage in primary sexual violence prevention through community and societal level approaches that address Indigenous Determinants of Health. MIWSAC has included primary prevention as part of general prevention, education and awareness activities for over 20 years. We have not intentionally focused on primary prevention, however. An initial organizational capacity assessment over the last few months has revealed gaps in our understanding of primary prevention, the infrastructure needed to support that work, and opportunities for growth in our prevention programming, including the need for data collection and evaluation processes to guide the work, redirecting when necessary. This application proposes to leverage our recent capacity assessment data to build on what we have learned to develop consensus among multi-sector partners around a realistic, sustainable Tribal Action Plan. We will pursue this planning through focused outreach to and gatherings of our membership and partners, especially newly formed connections with those related to health equity and social justice. We plan to enlarge the nucleus of an Advisory Group to include survivors, their families and others necessary to direct our work. We have identified school-based prevention programming as a Focus Population within which to pilot our Action Plan and test our data collection and evaluation methods in a localized way. Based on what we learn there, we propose to carry the implementation of the Action Plan to other venues over the next four years. As always, we will surround and infuse our work with the Indigenous values and Teachings which ground us.
