By Hayden Seder
The Advocates’ Green Dot program is a community wide strategy to prevent bullying, partner abuse, sexual assault and harassment, that has been implemented into the Wood River Valley’s schools as well as various establishments in the community.
An organization pioneering violence prevention work, Green Dot is a nationwide program adopted by The Advocates eight years ago. It has only been fully integrated into the Blaine County school system in the last five years when it was able to add another staff member, Heidi Cook, a violence prevention educator, to the prevention team. Three Advocates staff members, Cook, Teri Beck and Darrel Harris, have had Green Dot training and teach the programs to middle and high schoolers in Blaine, Custer, Camas and Lincoln counties.
While there are many programs that address bullying and violence, they are often aimed at either the victim or the perpetrator; few address bystanders the way the Green Dot program does. By teaching bystanders how to recognize when someone is in danger, they are empowered by Green Dot strategies to safely and effectively intervene.
“A lot of other programs about bullying are aimed at the bully or the victim, but a lot of the time you won’t be either, you’re a bystander,” Cook said. “Bystanders have larger numbers so they can have a bigger impact.”
The basis of Green Dot strategy lies in the 3 Ds: direct, delegate, and distract. The “direct” step advocates directly intervening in a situation, either pointing out the situation or talking to the person in it and asking if everything is OK. Delegate advocates diffusing the situation by getting help from another bystander, friend, or police officer. Distract advocates creating a distraction to deescalate the situation, like spilling a drink, asking for the time, or even dancing.
It was due to the statistics and positive results of the Green Dot program that The Advocates decided to implement the program into their own curriculum of violence prevention. A five-year study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which funds The Advocates’ program, along with the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare, found that 13 high schools in Kentucky that did Green Dot training had a 40 percent reduction in sexual violence and a 50 percent reduction in overall violence versus 13 other high schools that did not participate in the program. For some context, Cook explained that in most programs you see a reduction in violence by only about 6 percent.
But doing the program once is not enough. The Advocates’ goal is to make the terminology and ideas—particularly the 3 Ds—something that is reiterated to kids over the years from sixth grade through high school and on to college and even in their adult lives.
Emma Drucker, a 10th-grade teacher at The Sage School in Hailey, said adolescents can be “keen observers of the social norms within our society, so equipping them with the tools to not only notice social norms but to also shift social norms makes a huge difference,” she said. “Students use the language of Green Dot and are able to speak more openly, knowledgeably, and compassionately about moments of power-based personal violence that they notice in current events or in their own lives.”
Cook, her co-workers and teen interns visit all schools in the Valley, as well as in the other counties they serve, to teach a four- to six-hour workshop once a year on the tools that Green Dot advocates. They are also required by the program to revisit those same students a month later for a follow-up. During these visits, they give social-norm surveys to everyone in the school, even those who didn’t participate in the training. The surveys are all sent to the CDC for analysis.
In addition to training in schools, overview workshops are available to the community.
“In order to make big numbers in reducing violence in our community, everyone needs to be involved,” Cook said. “It’s not just about giving tools; it’s about changing cultural norms around violence.”
To learn more about The Advocates’ Green Dot program, visit greendot208.org.