Cultivating Protective Communities

Building a Safer Kansas Through Environmental Design

Working together, four unique Kansas communities will implement environmental design and strategic prevention practices to create and improve protective environments.

What is Environmental Design?

Environmental design and strategic prevention works to address how the physical environment, social environment, and situational context increase or decrease protective factors in our community, that address the risk of harm. The project will focus on reducing opportunities to engage in harm-causing behavior and increase the desirability of engaging in protective behaviors. This project is funded by the Rape Prevention and Education grant through the Kansas Department of Health and Environment. Collaboratively the Sexual Assault Prevention and Education Center in Douglas County, Jana's Campaign in Ellis County, Wichita Area Sexual Assault Center in Sedgwick County, and LiveWell in Finney County.

Deeper Dive Into Environmental Design

Connection

In 2024, the University of Kansas Sexual Assault Prevention Education Center (SAPEC) received funding from the Kansas Department of Health and Environment (KDHE) to establish the Cultivating Protective Communities program. This program uses research-based environmental design strategies to increase protective communities’ behaviors and reduce the risk of harm, like crime and violence, for all members of a community.

Working together, four unique Kansas communities are undertaking the task of implementing environmental design and strategic prevention practices to create and improve safety for all community members through the improvement of protective environments.

Implementation

Working with SAPEC, these site partners are encouraged to consider spaces in their communities where positive environmental design activities could have a significant impact on the safety of the populations in those spaces. Additionally, the communities should consider spaces that have collaborative ownership where collective prevention efforts can thrive. Examples of key spaces for communities to consider maximizing the impact of environmental design efforts include college campuses, community centers, bars and event spaces, and apartment complexes, and residential homes.

Environmental design and strategic prevention work to address how the physical environment, social environment, and situational context increase or decrease protective factors in communities and address the risk of harm. In recent years, research shows that violence prevention through environmental design (VPTED) is a promising practice for the prevention of sexual violence, community violence, and other crimes.

What Works?

Violence prevention through environmental design must be community-led. Research shows that risk factors in community violence include concentrated poverty, high population density, and low social cohesion. This means that an absence of social cohesion and a sense of community is a key element in areas experiencing violence. The lack of collective efforts, buy-in, and empowerment in a neighborhood is a risk factor for violence. Essentially, without a sense of neighborliness and looking out for each other, communities face the risk of violence.

As such, community led approaches to environmental design ensure that the community has buy-in and the actual needs of each unique community practicing environmental design can be addressed. The two have a reciprocal and mutually beneficial relationship, wherein community cohesion can help reduce violence and using community-based approaches to violence prevention can help increase community cohesion. Research shows that community-engaged neighborhood improvement efforts have a positive association with the development of social resources in a community that are helpful for deterring crime. Those social resources include an increased sense of community, social capital, and collective efficacy.

The Cultivating Protective Communities project is aligned with and builds off the community-engaged approach to violence prevention that recent research and studies have proven the effectiveness of.