What we do
Our vision is that we believe all communities across Merseyside have the right to be free from violence in order to provide the best life chances for all.
Our work has five over-arching themes:
The first 1,001 days of a child’s life are critical to their development and wellbeing. There is clear evidence that experiences during the early years of life play a unique role in shaping a child’s brain, with long-term consequences for health and wellbeing and life chances. The focus on early years, will complement the additional priorities to address the whole life cycle, including parent and family-based support and programmes, school readiness, building bonds, and understanding importance of attachments and relationships.
Find out more about our Early Years work
The whole school approach is key to implementing sustainable practices whilst building our offer to support statutory educational settings with guidance and programmes to reduce serious violence, exploitation, and other associated issues. There is a commitment to ensuring a strategic, evidence-based, co-ordinated approach which accurately measures impact, avoids repetition and protects against re-traumatisation.
Find out more about our Education work
Health is a cross cutting thematic, interwoven into all programme design and implementation, ranging from whole systems understanding, system and process evaluations for programmes, to health-based to provide opportunities to prevent and reduce serious violence. These could include improving mental health, physical health, and wellbeing, to understanding mental illness, understanding resilience in communities, or even access to health services. As this develops there will be opportunities for learning and evidence building to inform best practice, training and upskilling professionals, and ensuring our communities are represented and understood by our partnered professional bodies.
Find out more about our Health work
A holistic approach to supporting the whole family as a unit, bridging the gaps and bonds between parents and their children to prevent the impact of violence, allowing parents to understand and address their own trauma / ACEs to support them to be better parents. This is complemented by providing practical support for children and peer support.
Find out more about the Whole Family Approach
Previously titled `Reducing Reoffending`, MVRP want to focus on preventing any offending at the earliest opportunity, with the aim to also support those at reducing reoffending. Providing practical support assists to address individual need to aid rehabilitation and reduce offending, and restorative practices and programmes support the understanding of personal behaviours to aid positive change. Also aiming to support system and process change to aid those individuals and their families, from issues such as financial and housing support, to maintaining bonds and relationships with children and family members outside of the criminal justice system.
Find out about our work to Prevent Offending
Find out more about our Objectives
Community Engagement
As a partnership, we work closely with our communities to understand their strengths, challenges, and needs and determine how local investments will be made.
When communities are affected by violence, the key to sustainable solutions can often be found by speaking to residents about the underlying causes of crime, working with rather than deciding for them.
Working in a place-based way, these initiatives are about learning what the priorities are in each community and co-designing services with local people that will benefit their community.
We provide funding to the five Local Authority Community Safety Partnerships as part of our investment in community-led programmes.
Youth Voice
Crucial to our work to engage with all our communities, is our ongoing focus on listening to the voices of young people.
Taking a whole systems approach
We are committed to taking a whole system public health approach to violence prevention.
This approach involves a programme of activity to bring together relevant partner organisations to develop a coordinated approach to tackle the root causes of violence.
We have commissioned a range of research and evaluation projects to inform the development and implementation of our approach to violence prevention and to ensure we understand the development and impact of our projects and programmes.
Activities have focused on refining our priorities, expanding the expertise available to our team, implementing processes to ensure public health principles are embedded across the system, and funding projects.
With a strong focus on acting early, collectively these activities aim to support the achievement of the short, medium and long-term impacts of the MVRP.
Through evaluation and monitoring, we then test and refine our programmes to ensure their effectiveness.
Developed by our partners at Liverpool John Moores’ University, this model lists our current activities focused on reducing and preventing violence and how they can bring about change.