Approach

About Us | Approach

We believe in a world where all women and children can flourish, free from violence.

Vibrant activism in communities, in schools and
with decision-makers can make this vision a reality.

1,000

Schools in Uganda using the Good School Toolkit

50+

Journal articles about our evidenced-based methodologies

100+

Communities using the SASA! approach

1,000+

Members of the GBV Prevention Network

I thought activism was moving around with a placard and shouting. Now, I know I can do activism in many small ways—in how I treat others, in how I treat my house helper or children. Activism doesn’t have to be something big. Small things mean a lot.

Raising Voices Staff Member

Raising Voices is a place that treats community members with the same respect and inclusivity it does its staff. These porous boundaries between staff and community, the consistent respect for people and their ever-changing ideas, and the trust in people’s ability to use their own logic and experiences to come to the right conclusions [are] transformative.

Raising Voices Staff Member

Being part of a vibrant, self-reflective and striving organization has given me strength and has sustained my own belief that good work should not be ‘just work’ but a manifestation of one’s vision of how life ought to be.

Raising Voices Staff Member

Our Approach

At Raising Voices, we work across three areas to catalyze change: Practice, Learning & Influencing.

Our Practice

Raising Voices develops methodologies to prevent violence and supports partners around the world to adapt and apply these approaches in their communities.

We believe that learning from doing grounds us in reality and gives us credibility. So, we start with ideas, share them, refine them, test them, and when we know they are effective, we scale them. We call this Practice.

Group of people sitting together reading a document

Our Violence Prevention Learning Center supports Raising Voices’ partnerships with training, mentorship, technical assistance and more. Using creative formats, we delve into the theories, skills and values required for quality violence prevention. Over the years, we’ve collaborated with over 2,000 schools in Uganda and over 100 organizations across five continents.

All Raising Voices methodologies are grounded in theory and honed to reflect our key principles of violence prevention:

Aspirational content that inspires activism and critical reflection on the root cause of violence—unequal power between women and men, adults and children, girls and boys—that are embedded in our norms and institutions
Phased-in and holistic engagement across the community—individuals, families, teachers, leaders, institutions, governments and beyond
Flexible and adaptable materials that resonate in different settings

Our Learning

We are relentless in our pursuit of Learning. This makes us rigorous and responsive as we build, hone and apply new knowledge on what it takes to prevent violence.

Raising Voices specializes in practice-based learning—the cumulative knowledge acquired from designing and implementing ideas and methodologies over time, including insights gained from observations, direct experiences and program monitoring data.

Put simply, we elevate learning as a touchstone for transformation and growth. By remaining curious and taking steps to systematically learn (and unlearn), we create space to be reflexive and adaptive in our work.

As activists, we generate knowledge. We strive to stay accountable to our feminist identity throughout all our learning pursuits by:

Centering the experiences of women and children, with attention to their unique identities
Examining power hierarchies in the world and our programs, with a keen eye toward upending the status quo, which requires identifying early signs of backlash and carefully watching for unintended and intended impacts
Upholding the principle of “do no harm” across the learning cycle

Our Influencing

Preventing violence requires speaking up and transforming unjust power dynamics at all levels. Through our Influencing work, we promote feminist and child-centered perspectives within funding streams, prevention policies and global conversations.

We elevate lessons from our Practice and Learning to shape the broader field of violence prevention. We build relationships by earning trust and credibility. Then, we nurture those relationships. We listen, learn, generate dialogue, and share the insights that emerge. We reach out to people in power, forming a bridge between them and the many people helped—or harmed—by their decisions.

Preventing Violence Against Women and Children infographic highlighting Practice, Learning, and Influencing

We aim to influence not just content but also the spirit and values underpinning violence prevention efforts worldwide. In solidarity with our partners and allies, Raising Voices is shifting the broader ecosystems that shapes violence prevention work using diverse strategies:

Leveraging traditional and social media to provoke critical reflection on key issues in households, workplaces and public gatherings
Promoting solidarity, self and collective care, and a feminist analysis as core movement-building strategies to address violence against women