By Executive Director Claire Louge
I recently had coffee with a colleague who told me a story that’s too good not to share. It reminded me that though the work of prevention is complex, we sometimes forget solutions can be simple.
At the beginning of her career, Kelli worked in an Arizona school district community experiencing a lot of poverty, food insecurity, and violence, including domestic violence.
To keep their kids safe, parents avoided having them ride the bus to school. At morning drop-off, parents often looked visibly overwhelmed or exhausted.
One day, the district staff had a simple idea: At drop-off, they would start to give every parent a peanut butter sandwich. No matter who they were, they were offered one. The school didn’t have a big budget for this, so they had to do what they could. Just white bread and peanut butter. Parents could take it or leave it, but everyone was offered one.
After a few weeks of doing this, the district checked with the police department for updates on rates of violence in that community. And guess what? Domestic violence had gone down.
Am I implying peanut butter sandwiches solve domestic violence? No, of course not. This wasn’t a scientific study. Domestic violence is complex and rooted in factors like generational cycles of abuse, historical trauma, and chronic under-resourcing of communities.
But also, yes. Sometimes peanut butter sandwiches do help solve domestic violence. Because though human beings are complex, we’re also simple. Sometimes all we need is a snack, or a nap, or both. When we don’t have what we need, we don’t behave well. It’s not that we shouldn’t be accountable for our behavior. It’s that humans need what we need, and when we don’t have what we need, our behavior is predictable.
That’s what prevention is all about. Prevention is recognizing that when we meet people’s needs early, we stop the consequences of people not getting their needs met. And those consequences can be things like abuse, violence, and chronic disease, and if we find those things unacceptable, we need to prevent them. And we know how.
Sometimes, because problems are complex, we overthink our solutions. We want to create a perfect program that is inclusive of everyone’s specific needs or has a flawless evidence-based strategic plan before we do something that we know could help. Does everyone like peanut butter sandwiches? No. Are some people allergic to gluten or peanut butter? Yes. But that should not be stopping us from doing what we can with what we have.
And once we do something that works for some, we can do the next thing that meets other needs. We don’t have to overthink it. We don’t have time to. Human needs are now. The opportunity for prevention is always now.
When you start with what you can do, with what you have, where you are, you’ll continue to see opportunities to make a real difference. It never has to be perfect because it actually can’t be.
And it can be as simple as a peanut butter sandwich.