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The Family Violence Prevention Fund (FVPF) has chosen ten sites in nine states for a groundbreaking two-year violence prevention initiative designed to improve the health and safety of women and children. Project Connect: A Coordinated Public Health Initiative to Prevent Violence against Women is funded by the Office on Women’s Health of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. It will find new ways to identify, respond to and prevent domestic and sexual violence, and promote an improved public health response to abuse. Project Connect funding stems from the health provisions in the Violence against Women Reauthorization Act of 2005.

More than half the Project’s funds are directed to ten geographically and ethnically diverse sites that will create comprehensive models of public health prevention and intervention that can lead to improved health and safety. Each site will work with family planning, adolescent health, home visitation, and other maternal child health and perinatal programs to develop policy and public health responses to domestic and sexual violence. Project Connect grantees will also provide basic health and reproductive health services in domestic and sexual violence programs.

The FVPF, in collaboration with the OWH will provide technical assistance and monitor the grantees selected for Project Connect. Ten grantees were selected through a competitive process and will be awarded $200,000 for implementation.

In addition to the ten funded sites this program also supports the creation of continuing medical education materials designed to reach thousands of providers and health professional students. The project will use a web-based platform to educate and promote clinical skills for medical and nursing students and providers, giving them continuing education credits as they learn to assess, identify and provide support and intervention with victims of violence in a variety of health settings. In addition, new patient and provider education tools and will promote strategies to create sustainable system changes in health and public health programs nationwide.

Learn more about Project Connect and the sites selected by reading the Press Release.

The FVPF is no longer accepting applications for the Project Connect initiative. The deadline was February 8, 2010. Thank you to all who submitted applications for this exciting initiative.

For more information on the Project Connect initiative, please contact Lisa James (lisa@endabuse.org) at 415-252-8900 ext. 27.