Twice this month The DOVE Project will offer free trainings to help reduce violence and hostility on the island.
The domestic violence agency will provide 90-minute Green Dot training sessions that organizers say will introduce participants to the idea of bystander awareness and intervention and will provide tools to help people step up at sometimes difficult times.
“You do not come away saying, ‘I just cannot intervene,’” said training organizer Nicole Grey. “You come away saying, ‘Wow there are so many things I could do.’”
The program, which is offered throughout this country and internationally to schools and other organizations working to foster safe communities, offers insight into how to intervene in a range of challenging situations — from teen bullying, harassment in a bar to parents treating their children harshly. The curriculum provides three options for action, Grey said: direct intervention, delegating and distraction. Using that range of approaches to a difficult situation in a bar, Grey said the first option might be directly confronting someone who had too much to drink, while the second could include speaking with a friend of a person to determine if that person is alright, and the final option, — distraction — could be spilling a drink on a person and helping them clean up as a means to extricate them from a bad situation.
Grey added the information is practical and works to prevent violence from happening.
“It gets your gears spinning about all the things you could do,” she said.
While Vashon is a fairly safe community, Grey says she sees many needs that Green Dot training could help address.
“Acts of violence do occur here; sexual assault occurs here; domestic violence happens here,” she said, adding that bullying and family dysfunction also occur.
The training, she said, helps counter those incidents, creating non-tolerance for them in the community.
The identical trainings will be from 5:30 to 7 p.m. Monday, Jan. 9, and 3:30 to 5 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 21, at the Open Space for Arts & Community. Reserve a spot by emailing nyn@vashon doveproject.org or calling 940-6430.
