AARDVARC.org PRESENTSThe SPRING Project: Aiding Victim Services Professionals |
THE SPRING PROJECT: Overview
A Service Provider Resource, Interaction, and Networking Gateway
Traditionally, law enforcement agencies trained and consulted with law enforcement agencies; victim advocates trained and consulted with victim advocates; and so on. This type of exclusivity not only creates feelings of mistrust and misinformation among diverse service providers - the right hand is not sure what the left hand is doing and why -, but also tends to keep them estranged from each other and thus from fully understanding, appreciating and most of all collaborating to provide comprehensive approaches to the problems of relationship and sexual violence. A guiding force behind this project is the desire to foster dialogues and establish partnerships between providers that have not traditionally worked together. Further, we believe that exposing service provision areas to the duties, responsibilities and challenges faced by their peers in other specialty areas will increase appreciation and respect between these various providers, further laying the groundwork for collaborative interaction.
We also find that many agencies and programs suffer from a lack of networking opportunities; not only between one type of agency and another type of agency, but even between agencies with similar goals, missions, services and populations served. These opportunities too frequently present themselves only at annual conferences or are available only to those providers who happen to have access to innovative collaborative programs locally. For small programs who can not afford to lose a single staff member for a day, for rural programs lacking access to these opportunities, and for small grass-roots agencies unable to afford such events, even these occasional opportunities are a moot point. This project proposes to alleviate many of the problems of cost, time and distance that impede active participation of professionals addressing sexual and relationship violence.
Additionally, the victim services field is becoming more and more specialized as evidenced both by the number of programs specifically created to serve the needs of targeted and underserved populations - such as gays and lesbians, ethnic groups, cultural groups and persons with disabilities, etc. - and by the number of government and privately funded research activities designed to acknowledge and make recommendations on service delivery to these specific victims. This specialization creates an additional need for targeted networking opportunities and information exchange.
Finally, based on our interaction with service providers via our website at AARDVARC.org over the last three years, we are struck by the number of requests that we receive from service providers who seem to express the same needs over and over again. Most commonly, these include: requests for materials and handouts; samples of policy and procedure manuals and protocols for law enforcement and first responder type programs; and tips and pointers on where to locate research and statistics; presumably for the purposes of substantiating programmatic changes or to support requests for funding. These repeated requests to a small organization such as ours would indicate that those requesting the materials are not easily finding what they need elsewhere. Whether this indicates inadequate knowledge of existing resources, intimidation experienced when trying to weave through complex libraries of material or simply a lack of available research time on the part of the requestor can only be speculated. What is clear, however, is that victim service providers from across the spectrum are actively soliciting our assistance in locating resources, seeking opportunities to network with each other and using the internet as a vehicle towards these ends.
The S.P.R.I.N.G. Project intends to assist our audience by providing new avenues for peer to peer multi-specialty interaction between members of diverse service provision programs and agencies supplemented by a library of resources, manuals, and other materials to professionals in the victim services field to aid their individual, agency-level and provider type efforts on behalf of victims.
