Valencia Peterson

My work in violence prevention is deeply rooted in my personal story. At a very early age, my father killed my mother, and that tragedy shaped my entire career path. I really felt that I wanted to stand on her shoulders and give back and contribute to prevention in that area. For the first 10 years, I worked in intervention, going to court with women who had already been in domestic violence situations, working with organizations like Women Against Abuse and Hazio Haven. But after a while, I felt like I was behind the eight ball - everything was intervention, and there was nothing really toward prevention. So about 11 years ago, I decided to take a total 360 and focus on violence prevention with all its facets. I took a really unique approach and decided to use a violent sport, football, to infiltrate the game with violence prevention. I became a football coach and worked with the Coaching Boys to Men curriculum from Futures Without Violence, which I later helped revise based on my knowledge of the streets and understanding where my young men were. What's beautiful about this platform is that once I got a coach to buy in, I automatically had a captive audience of 60 young boys. I spend 15 minutes a week doing specific lessons with them around healthy relationships and getting them to critically think about themselves. Over a whole season of football, there are so many teachable moments where I can help them develop plays for self-regulation that transfer off the field into prevention. I've dove heavily into trauma work, studying with Dr. Bruce Perry on the neuro-sequential model and understanding how early childhood trauma affects who you become. I help my boys understand that it wasn't their fault how they dealt with different things, because some things that happened to them, they weren't in control of. The amount of freedom that my young men started to experience in understanding themselves, that they're not this bad person after all, has had an amazing impact on how they looked at themselves and therefore how they chose to live. I founded ODAP (Open Door Abuse Awareness Prevention) and now I'm expanding by training coaches through my Trauma-Informed Coaching 101 course, which has been sanctioned by the University of Pittsburgh Medical College for CEUs. My goal is to have this course done across a bunch of cities, states, and even countries - I've been approached by people from Canada to New Zealand asking about the work I do around sports and violence prevention and trauma.