Community Based Approaches to Preventing and Addressing Hate Crimes Against AAPI and LGBTQ communities in San Diego County California

Nonviolent Peaceforce proposes to implement Community Based Approach to Preventing and Addressing Hate Crimes Against AAPI and LGBTQ communities in San Diego County California. We are requesting $400,000 to address the rapid increase in hate against Asian and LGBTQ community members in this county. The overall goal of the project is to strengthen the safety ecosystem and build intersectional capacity and solidarity with the local AAPI and LGBTQ+ communities to keep themselves safe from hate crimes and hate incidents. The project has four main sub-goals: First, to prevent hate crimes through designing and implementing strategies that protect potential victims from being targets of hate crimes and hate incidents. Second, to promote community awareness of strategies and tools to use to respond nonviolently to hate-based aggression and promote healing within the communities who have been targeted. Third, to increase victim reporting of hate incidents by providing training materials and culturally differentiated outreach in the many languages of the Asian diaspora in the San Diego area increasing awareness of what constitutes a hate incident and how to report it. And, finally, to improve responses to hate crimes and hate incidents by providing protective accompaniment for victims by trained volunteers from their community to file a police report and to receive culturally appropriate support services. Project activities include convening a coalition and creating a project action plan in the first six months, developing outreach materials and trainings in multiple languages, carrying out protective accompaniments, supporting local community organizations to create their own safety volunteer teams, and implementing a train the trainer program. Nonviolent Peaceforce will lead the data collection and reporting on the project, signing data sharing agreements with community partners in order to measure the number of community members trained in mutual protection skills, the increase in awareness of hate crime and hate incident reporting channels, the number of reports by AAPI and LGBTQ community members, the numbers of community members trained and conducting protective accompaniment and the number of trainers and community safety teams formed. At the end of the 3-year project, Nonviolent Peaceforce will have the data to share how we were able to increase community safety and capacity to respond to hate violence against both the AAPI and LGBTQ communities of San Diego County. We anticipate that this will significantly contribute to a national effort to identify promising practices to help these communities feel and be safer.