With only a few weeks until school starts, many California parents and students are gearing up for a year of academic and social growth. It’s an exciting time when everyone wants to put their best foot forward. The same goes for people working in adolescent dating abuse prevention; this is the time for finishing up plans to engage youth during the upcoming school year. Did you know that these prevention activities can actually be fun? 

Having fun and engaging activities is a vital component of learning; so it’s no surprise that when advocates incorporate fun into the content and curriculum for prevention programs, it enhances the learning experience. When they have fun, students automatically build relationships with each other and adults–both protective factors in preventing violence. In advocate speak, we call this group cohesion. Building in time for fun or silly openings and closings to groups is just one way to build group cohesion, which builds those positive peer and adult relationships.

While not every lesson will be described as fun, every lesson should have opportunities for fun elements: active learning and engagement. Sometimes when I was facilitating a training or educational group, I would feel a sense of urgency over the information I wanted to provide and how little time I had to do so. One mistake I sometimes made was trying to give too much information without focusing on engaging the audience or group. I learned how important it is to think about quality over quantity for each lesson, and to be thoughtful about how much information to cover within one lesson, especially when possible it is important to have multiple sessions with the same group. One resource that can help in the development of prevention programs is the Principles of Prevention. You can learn more about the Principles of Prevention in this article on the CDC website.

Another place to incorporate fun into your prevention work is with community relationship building. Taking the time to build relationships with and among the community is vital in prevention work. Community connectedness, school connectedness, connections to family, positive social relationships, and positive adult youth relationships are all strong protective factors against intimate partner violence and other forms of violence experienced in the community. We should incorporate more opportunities for fun and community building in our prevention work: host a community dinner, participate in community events, have a family fun night open to everyone in the community, attend neighborhood meetings (and bring food), and show up for your partner organizations’ events. Providing opportunities for people to gather together and build relationships with each other and your agency will help build community connectedness and can be a fun event for agency staff!

But you don’t have to be a prevention advocate to bring your community together. Everyone’s commitment to building community is important. What are some of the creative ways incorporate fun when opening or closing groups?