The PreventX conference in 2024 brought a fresh focus on how to craft and deliver messages that shift hearts and minds to deliver long-term and sustainable social change to prevent family and gender-based violence. Drawing from extensive experience in messaging, effective campaigns, grassroots mobilising and advocacy, PreventX showcased and helped to build knowledge about messages that resonate and effect change.

This tip sheet summarises the key learnings from PreventX around messaging to advance primary prevention right now.

Building community engagement and support through tailored, strengths-based messaging is an essential part of any primary prevention project. When working in multicultural and faith-based settings, ensuring that the community’s experiences and desires are embedded into your messaging is key to creating cultural safety and effective programs. 

This resource draws on the existing evidence base, as well as practice examples from members of the Connecting Communities network, to outline how a values-based messaging approach can be applied with multicultural and faith-communities to strengthen your prevention messaging. It aims to highlight the role of values-based messaging as a tool to engage community, build trust and address backlash and resistance by creating messages that resonate with communities. 

This resource has been developed as part of the Connecting Communities program, a partnership program between the Multicultural Centre for Women’s Health (MCWH) and Safe and Equal to support the learning and professional development needs of the Connecting Communities network, a network of organisations working with multicultural and faith-based communities to prevent violence against women in Victoria since 2022.