Welcome
Prevention Team
Welcome
The Prevention Team engages community members in collaborative learning, development, and outreach initiatives designed to reduce harm, improve systems and structures, and catalyze culture change.
Connect with us! If you would like to contact the Prevention Team, please email csndr_prevention@harvard.edu
Team Introduction
Our Purpose:
We seek to reduce discrimination, interpersonal violence, and the impacts of such harm through strategic, educational, and collaborative efforts in the Harvard community.
Who we Serve:
The Prevention Team serves all Harvard students, faculty, staff, and postdoctoral fellows across of Harvard's Schools and business units.
Work with Us:
We work with you to create collaborative learning, development, and outreach initiatives to reduce harm, improve systems and structures, and catalyze culture change.
About the Prevention Team:
Our team is supported by the Associate Director for Strategic Prevention Initiatives and by the Education Project Manager.
Our Recent Work
HESMA Survey
The Prevention Team has been working with Harvard community members to address key findings from the recently release results of the Higher Education Sexual Misconduct and Awareness (HESMA) Survey, which yielded a 35% response rate across the University and one of the highest across the U.S.
Shaping Prevention on a National Level
The Prevention Team recently presented at the 2024 Public Summit of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) Action Collaborative on Preventing Sexual Harassment. Check out the Summit’s events here!
Cultivating Community at Student Orientation
Each year, the Prevention Team supports Harvard Schools in developing orientation programming that seeks to prevent discrimination, bullying, sexual harassment, and sexual misconduct.
eLearning Initiatives
In 2025, the Prevention Team has worked with closely with campus partners to develop University-wide eLearning modules designed to improve awareness and prevention efforts related to non-discrimination, sexual harassment, and other sexual misconduct.
Promoting Community Knowledge
In 2025, the Prevention Team has begun working collaboratively with Harvard's Schools and units to create interactive programming that engages community members around the University's non-discrimination and anti-bullying policies, related supportive resources, and how we can all play a role in prevention. Contact us to request a training for your School or unit.
Understanding Prevention
Our team is here to help you fulfill your vision for a safer and more inclusive Harvard.
Whether you are a student, staff member, faculty member, or postdoctoral fellow, the Prevention Team collaborates with you to design, facilitate, and evaluate initiatives to increase communities' collective capacity to address and reduce power-based interpersonal harm, including discrimination, bullying, sexual harassment, and other sexual misconduct.
Examples of individuals and groups who work with the Prevention Team include: recognized student organizations, final clubs, athletics, executive leaders, department chairs and administrators, research centers, laboratories, classroom instructors, and more.
How do we engage in prevention work?
Assessment & Consultation: We provide evidenced-based community assessment tools, and provide consultative services on best practices for reducing the likelihood of discrimination, bullying, sexual harassment, and other sexual misconduct in higher education.
Education & Training: We deliver workshops, presentations, and learning initiatives to help community members recognize the University's policies and develop prevention and response skills.
Engagement & Outreach: We offer events, materials, and other opportunities to raise awareness of resources and build connection across the community.
For more information about how to engage with our services, visit the "Services" page here on our website!
The Prevention Team believes:
- Everyone deserves to feel safe and valued in the spaces where we learn, live, teach, study, and work.
- We all can play a critical role in reducing, preventing, and ending discrimination, interpersonal violence, and the impacts of such harm.
- Discrimination and interpersonal violence are significant public health issues with physical, emotional, financial, and social health consequences.
- Prevention is a collective, intersectional endeavor that requires the efforts of structures and systems as well as individuals and communities.
- Prevention begins with care, attention, curiosity, and consent.
- Efforts to advance harm prevention and non-discrimination must be rooted in values that include agency, accountability, community, integrity, and transformation.
Prevention refers to efforts to reduce likelihood of harm, address conditions that give rise to harm, and influencing other factors that contribute to violence and harm within and across communities.
The Prevention Team utilizes and adapts existing evidence-based frameworks to our approach to preventing and reducing harm within the Harvard Community. These include:
The Prevention Puzzle
- We all have a role to play in preventing power-based interpersonal harm in our communities.
- The Prevention Team works to help Harvard community members recognize where we each have the power to improve safety and belonging on interpersonal, structural, and cultural levels.
- This means that while active bystanders are key to disrupting and discouraging harmful conduct in our communities, being an active bystander is just one piece of the puzzle.
- For example, you may be in a position to improve systems and structures in your organization, department, lab, or classroom. You might be able to catalyze culture change in your team, residential community, or friend group by working to shift norms, attitudes, and values toward consent, care, and belonging.
- No matter how you approach prevention as a member of the Harvard community, please know that your voice matters. Whether you are speaking up when witnessing harm or shaping policy change toward greater equity, our collective actions make a difference.
A Public Health Framework for Prevention: Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary Approaches
- Primary prevention occurs upstream, where we can improve conditions that give rise to harm in the first place
- Secondary prevention occurs midstream, where the conditions for harm already exist, but actions are taken to safeguard against harm occurring and recurring.
- Tertiary prevention occurs after a person or people have been impacted by harm, where the focus becomes support, healing, and the co-creation of improved conditions for the future
- Learn more about our approach to prevention on the Prevention Learning Hub!
The Prevention Team’s primary goals are:
- First and foremost, to effectively reduce the prevalence of discrimination, interpersonal violence, and the impacts of such harm at Harvard.
- To help each member of the Harvard community to recognize the role we can play fostering an environment free from discrimination and interpersonal violence.
- To co-create and clarify shared community values and norms that center agency, boundaries, and consent.
- To support groups, teams, and organizations in fostering psychological safety to promote active bystander intervention.
- For community members to be caring, active bystanders.
- For community members to be able to make informed choices about accessing supportive resources and processes that fit their needs.
- For community members to feel confident accessing the supportive resources available across Harvard.
Contact Prevention
Email csndr_prevention@harvard.edu
Sign up for our mailing list.
