Why Invest in Violence Prevention?

This document has been prepared by the Funders’ Connect project group of the Violence Prevention Alliance (VPA). The Funders' Connect group is led by staff from the Education Development Center in Massachusetts, USA, and includes VPA participants from Brazil, the UK, the USA, and the World Health Organization's headquarters in Switzerland. It aims to connect violence prevention practitioners with potential funders, and to connect donors that already fund violence prevention with one another. In this way, the Funders' Connect group hopes to increase the amount and quality of funding available to public health oriented violence prevention programmes everywhere.

This document aims to make the case for increasing financial investment in the public health approach to the prevention of violence, and by doing so to strengthen the effectiveness of prevention programming, with the ultimate goal of preventing new acts of violence and averting their consequences for individuals, families, communities and societies.

We encourage readers to draw upon the text of this document when preparing your own proposals and presentations aimed at making the case for increased violence prevention funding. You may use the text in part or as a whole, but in so doing please acknowledge this document as the source (see suggested citation on the cover page).