At the national level, Latinos United for Peace and Equity centers its programming around changing the social conditions that give rise to violence.
We work at all levels of the socio-ecological model to engage individuals and communities and ignite change.
Education is not about attending a training or taking a class. Education is a commitment and a journey that starts with a desire to expand one’s worldview. As such, Latinos United for Peace and Equity is committed to collaborating and partnering with those who wish to transform our society for the benefit of current and future generations. LUPE’s educational initiatives are grounded in the lived realities and work of communities of color, in the expertise of researchers, and the wisdom of practitioners in the field. We offer multiple modalities of engagement, including community-based conversations, webinars, conferences, consultations, mentorship, multi-layered systems engagement and systems transformation, and resource and tools development. Finally, we recognize that our educational initiatives cannot be done in isolation, and thus, we partner with multiple stakeholders.
EXISTING PARTNERSHIPS
Vera Institute of Justice’s National Resource Center (NRC)
The NRC provides dedicated training and technical assistance that expands the field’s capacity to provide culturally and linguistically specific, trauma-informed, and accessible victim services that successfully identify, reach, and meet the needs of underserved victims in eight areas: children, persons with disabilities, older adults, historically marginalized communities, men of color, individuals with Limited English proficiency; formerly incarcerated individuals; and LGBTQ individuals.
As a partner to the NRC, LUPE provides training and technical assistance to promote culturally responsive, trauma informed services; build the capacity of the crime victims field to assess their own readiness to serve a diverse constituency and improve current approaches to recruit, hire, develop, and sustain a diverse staff; and develop resources to help organizations build and sustaining meaningful collaborations.
Futures Without Violence
LUPE serves as a partner on Futures Without Violence’s Quality Improvement Center on Domestic Violence in Child Welfare, helping to develop culturally appropriate resources, provide training and technical assistance, and to implement a Research and Capacity Building Project to strengthen the evidence foundation for culturally appropriate, collaborative responses to families experiencing domestic violence who are involved in the child welfare system.
LUPE provides support to the Futures Without Violence’s Promising Futures Capacity Building Center, Expanding Services to Children, Youth, and Abused Parents initiative designed to build organizational structures and services that prioritize child well-being, healing, resilience, and breaking the intergenerational cycle of violence within the context of the parent-child relationship. LUPE helps to enhance culturally appropriate training, technical assistance, policy and product development.
LUPE’s approach to technical assistance and consultation is rooted in our value of mutuality. We value the expertise and realities of each individual and organization that we connect with. Each opportunity to connect is an opportunity for mutual learning and exchange. LUPE team members hold expertise in many areas, and also operate from a place of curiosity, humility, and growth.
The value of transformation also informs all technical assistance efforts. Our process creates spaces for self-reflection, truth telling, and shifting power in policy and practice. We respond to the identified goal of the organization, and function with responsiveness and flexibility to critical conversations that surface during the process.
Technical assistance can range from a brief consultation about a critical question or request for a specific resource to a multi-session conversation about a transformational topic. The goal of technical assistance is to support individuals and organizations to reach their goals and do their best work.
Changing the social conditions that give rise to violence—and the responses we have as a society—require that we develop public policy initiatives which are nuanced and responsive to the lived experiences of survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, dating violence, and sex trafficking. Public policy creates frameworks and infrastructures for how we respond to and prevent violence in our communities. Public policy dictates the allocation of funding, the representation of communities, and the decisions that shape society. Nonetheless, public policy has not always taken into consideration the lived realities of people living with intersecting identities. Our Public Policy team seeks to bring an intersectional analysis to public policy by education policy makers on how laws, rules and regulations disproportionately impact survivors of color; advocating for more inclusive public policy initiatives; and working with systems to create policies that are responsive to communities of color.
A multipronged approach to changing the social conditions that give rise to violence requires that we engage in raising the public discourse and community engagement. It is this dialogue and engagement that create—in the words of Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire—a concientización (a consciousness), which in turn transform paradigms for the ways we live. LUPE seeks to create connection, dialogue, and inspiration for change through community wide campaigns and opportunities for community-led engagement initiatives.
Our team of research and evaluation specialists know that systems and community change must be grounded in evidence-based practices. Nonetheless, our team also acknowledges that such practices have been established through mainstream, and not culturally specific and intersectional, frameworks of research and program evaluation. Our Research and Evaluation team works to elevate an intersectional approach to quantitative and qualitative analysis, program evaluation, and research. We also take pride in nurturing the capacity of other organizations and researchers to approach their evaluative processes with trauma informed and intersectional methodologies.