Product Details

Author Information

Corresponding Author
Tina Hancock
Department of Social Work
NC State University
Campus Box 7639
Raleigh, NC 27695-7639
United States
p: (919) 513-7958
thancock@nmsu.edu

Authors (listed in order of authorship):
Natalie Ames

Andrew Behnke

Product Description and Application Narrative Submitted by Corresponding Author

What general topics does your product address?

Public Health, Social Work

What specific topics does your product address?

Domestic violence, Immigrant/refugee health, Rural health, Women's health

Does your product focus on a specific population(s)?

Immigrant, Latino/Hispanic

What methodological approaches were used in the development of your product, or are discussed in your product?

Focus group , Qualitative research

What resource type(s) best describe(s) your product?

Manual/how to guide

Application Narrative

1. Please provide a 1600 character abstract describing your product, its intended use and the audiences for which it would be appropriate.*

The product consists of two manuals. Both are entitled “Lighting the Way to a Better Future: A Domestic Violence Prevention Program for Churches. The first is subtitled “A Guide for Domestic Violence Team Members” and is a training manual for human services and cooperative extension professionals who wish to prepare Latino pastors to address domestic violence in their communities. The focus is on rural areas where immigrant populations are concentrated and culturally relevant resources lacking.

The second manual is subtitled: “A Resource Manual for Pastors” and is printed in Spanish and English.

The trainers’ manual provides an overview of religious and cultural factors central to domestic violence among Latino families. It offers background material on domestic violence, cultural considerations, developing community-based training teams, making contacts with Latino pastors, and developing training workshops to prepare pastors to engage in domestic violence prevention and intervention activities with their congregations.

The pastors’ resource guide is designed to be given to pastors at a training workshop. It contains facts about abuse, outlines and scriptural references for sermons that focus on promoting healthy family relationships, ideas for church-based activities that incorporate an educational component on families and domestic violence, guidance on how to talk to at-risk or abused women and abusive men, and information about national, state and local resources.

Our manuals primarily target Latino pastors and lay ministers in evangelical Protestant churches. Many have no formal theological training and/or have relatively low levels of educational attainment. In order to make the material comprehensible to these individuals, we wrote the pastors’ manual about the 8th grade level.

2. What are the goals of the product?

The two manuals we developed are the backbone of our project. Immigrant Latinas threatened by domestic violence may not have access to culturally competent services, especially in small towns and rural areas. Even if services are available, Latinas may be reluctant to seek help outside the family or immigrant community due to deportation fears or cultural values. The two manuals we developed are a tool to educate the pastors or lay ministers who are trusted members of local Latino communities to reach families involved in domestic violence. These individuals often lack formal training and may have only a grade school education.

The trainers’ manual provides the structure and content for training local professionals to work with Latino pastors in their communities. The pastors’ manual provides the structure and content for trainers to prepare the pastors to address domestic violence in their congregations and in the immigrant community. The trainers’ manual was designed for use by local social service, health and mental health professionals interested in working in inter-agency teams to involve Latino pastors in domestic violence prevention and intervention. It is provided to participants at a trainers’ workshop conducted by leaders such as university professors or extension agents. The manual includes material for trainers to use to recruit, train and provide on-going support for Latino pastors who are willing to confront the problem of domestic violence in their churches.

The pastors’ manual is given to church leaders who complete the training provided by trained local professionals. The manual offers background information on all forms of domestic violence. It is a tool for helping pastors understand that (1) women are not responsible for causing or stopping the abuse and require protection and (2) men are respected as household heads but those who abuse their partners are responsible for causing and stopping the abuse. It identifies scriptures supporting healthy family relationships and offers Biblically-based support for defining physical harm as sin and changing hurtful behavior through repenting and seeking forgiveness.

The pastors’ manual provides outlines and specific scriptural references for sermons that integrate messages about domestic violence prevention/cessation. It suggests church-based activities for families that include educational components on expressing anger and resolving conflict in healthy ways. It also contains instruction on reaching out to abused women and abusive men. The guide includes information on national, state and local resources to enable pastors to refer troubled families to resources such as health and social services, emergency assistance with food and clothing, and domestic violence information and services.

3. Who are the intended audiences or expected users of the product?

The intended audience for the trainers’ manual includes professionals such as educators, county extension agents, and local health social service professionals. These professionals must also be familiar with the pastor’s guide in order to prepare pastors to engage in domestic violence prevention and intervention activities. These community-based teams use the material in the trainer’s manual to guide the recruitment, training and on-going support for Latino pastors willing to address domestic violence in the immigrant community. The trainers, working in groups, recruit and bring the pastors together in small groups to cover the material in the trainer’s manual and introduce the pastors to the pastors’ manual. After the training, the pastors use the pastors’ manual on an on-going basis to guide their prevention and intervention activities in their churches and immigrant communities.

4. Please provide any special instructions for successful use of the product, if necessary. If your product has been previously published, please provide the appropriate citation below.

Those who wish to train pastors should familiarize themselves thoroughly with the material in the trainers’ manual and use it to structure local training workshops for pastors. They must also be familiar with the pastors’ manual in order to review it with pastors, discuss its use, and answer their questions. If possible, we suggest that members of community teams be fluent in Spanish and conduct their trainings in Spanish. It is also helpful to have a domestic violence professional as a member of the team. As written, our pastors’ manual contains information about local health and human services resources in North Carolina. Users can delete that information. If at all possible, we suggest that they collect resource information for the local areas they serve.

5. Please describe how your product or the project that resulted in the product builds on a relevant field, discipline or prior work. You may cite the literature and provide a bibliography in the next question if appropriate.

Our project is designed to engage Latino pastors, as targets and agents of change, in addressing domestic violence in the Latino immigrant population. Although there has been an influx of Latinos in small towns and rural areas, there are few formal, culturally acceptable, bilingual services domestic violence services for Latino families. At the same time, migration stress, shifting gender role expectations, poverty, substandard housing, limited access to health care, intermittent employment, and low wages combine to heighten every day stress and the risk for domestic violence (1). Some evidence (2) suggests abuse rates for immigrant Latinas in rural areas may be significantly higher than the national prevalence and that domestic violence is a serious problem for this population. Factors that may deter abused Latinas from seeking assistance include fear of deportation, fear that a partner’s arrest could result in loss of family income or deportation, and reluctance to seek assistance outside the family or immigrant community (3). Even when willing to seek help, culturally competent, bilingual domestic violence services for at-risk immigrant Latinas and their partners may not exist in rural communities and small towns (4)(5).

Hancock(1) suggested a role for Latino churches as part of a community-based response to at-risk and abused Latina immigrants in small towns and rural communities. Hancock and Ames(6) built upon this theme in an article calling upon social workers to collaborate with and support Latino church leaders in preventing and intervening in domestic violence in rural Latino immigrant communities. They presented a model for involving Latino pastors in church-based efforts to 1) deliver material, social and educational supports for women, couples, and families experiencing domestic violence; 2) assess, refer and educate congregations and families about abuse and the need to protect women from violence, and 3) provide appropriate, constructive advice to at-risk women and those being abused and their abusive partners.

Although pastors may be interested in helping troubled families, studies show that they often have little training about domestic violence and no idea how to approach it (7). To confound this limitation, an increasing number of churches serving Latino immigrant communities in rural areas are conservative, evangelical Protestant (8). Pastors in these churches are more likely to adhere to doctrines that require women to be submissive to their husbands and to remain in a violent situation even if it means tolerating abuse (9).

6. Please provide a bibliography for work cited above or in other parts of this application. Provide full references, in the order sited in the text (i.e. according to number order). .

Hancock T. Addressing wife abuse in Mexican immigrant couples: challenges for family social workers. J Fam Soc Work 2006:Vol. 10(3):31-50.

Murdaugh C, Hunt S, Sowell R, Santana I. Domestic violence in Hispanics in the Southeastern United States: a survey and needs analysis. J Fam Viol 2004:Vol. 19(2):107-115.

Yoshioka MR, Choi DY. Culture and interpersonal violence research: paradigm shift to create a full continuum of domestic violence services. J Inter Viol 2005:Vol. 20(4):513-519.

Hancock TU. Sin papeles: undocumented Mexicans in the rural United States. Aff J Wom Soc Work 2007:Vol. 22(2):175-184.

Hancock TU, Siu K. A culturally sensitive intervention with domestically violent Latino immigrant men. J Fam Viol 2009:24:123-132.

Hancock TU, & Ames N. Toward a model for engaging Latino lay ministers in domestic violence intervention. Fam Soc J Cont Soc Serv 2008:Vol. 89(4):623-630.

Wong Gengler SW, Lee JW. Ministers’ understanding of battered women: differences among Catholic male priests, Protestant female ministers and Protestant male ministers. J Rel Abu 2001:Vol. 3(3/4):41-59.

Seller J. Despite Protestant growth, Hispanic Catholicism holds steady in the U.S. Chr Today [serial online] Feb [cited July 6, 2006] 2003:Vol. 47. Available from http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2003/februaryweb-only/2-3-53.0.html?start=2

Collins WL, Moore SE. Theological and practice issues regarding domestic violence: how can the black church help victims? Soc Work Chris 2006:Vol. 33(3):252-267.

Ames N, Hancock T, Behnke A. Latino church leaders and domestic violence: Attitudes and knowledge. J Fam Soc 2011: Vol 92(2):161-168.

Moracco, K. E., Hilton, A., Hodges, K.G., & Frasier, P. Y. Knowledge and attitudes about intimate partner violence among immigrant Latinos in rural North Carolina. Viol Ag Wom 2005:Vol. 11(3):337-352

Behnke A, Ames N, Hancock T. What would they do? Latino church leaders and domestic violence (Under review, J Inter Viol).

7. Please describe the project or body of work from which the submitted product developed. Describe the ways that community and academic/institutional expertise contributed to the project. Pay particular attention to demonstrating the quality or rigor of the work:

• For research-related work, describe (if relevant) study aims, design, sample, measurement instruments, and analysis and interpretation. Discuss how you verified the accuracy of your data.
• For education-related work, describe (if relevant) any needs assessment conducted, learning objectives, educational strategies incorporated, and evaluation of learning.
• For other types of work, discuss how the project was developed and reasons for the methodological choices made.

One of the Co-Principle Investigators of the grants that funded the project had taught at a university with an outreach program that prepared Latino lay ministers for service in Evangelical churches. The project idea emerged from conversations with program director who expressed the need for content on domestic violence in the pastoral counseling unit. Additional input came from a discussion with a local group of Latino pastors who met regularly. They indicated that domestic violence was a problem in their communities that they did not feel prepared to address.

In order to learn more about the educational needs of the lay Ministers, we conducted two focus groups with 28 students enrolled in the theological program. The 90-minute focus groups were conducted in Spanish and audiotaped. We used a nine-item interview protocol of open-ended questions to elicit information on their attitudes and knowledge about domestic violence. To analyze the data, we grouped words and phrases by similarities to develop initial themes or categories of recurring concepts, after which we met to refine the themes into initial categories. Once the categories were agreed upon, we created a code for each category and developed a coding sheet with mutually exclusive definitions for each category. Basically, we learned that they viewed churches as an appropriate resource for addressing domestic violence but that they felt unprepared to do this without some training (Ames, Hancock, & Behnke (2011).

We also administered surveys to these same 28 lay ministers to measure their attitudes toward domestic violence. The questions were used with permission from a study of intimate partner violence among immigrant Latinos (Moracco, Hilton, Hodges, and Frasier, 2005). Sample items included: “When a man in a couple is violent towards the woman, it is often her fault because she provoked it” and “It is God's will for couples to stay together, even if the husband is violent towards the wife”.

Most acknowledged the need for counseling, referring, and engaging law enforcement. However, two-fifths agreed that stopping domestic violence is the woman’s responsibility. These responses suggested that the conservative nature of these church leaders may lead them to justify violence. This feedback led us to view church leaders as both targets of change and agents of change in addressing domestic violence in the immigrant community (Behnke, Ames & Hancock, under review) and provided valuable insights regarding the training needs of this population.

With funds from two grants, we pulled together a group to begin planning a project to train Latino pastors to respond to domestic violence in a more informed and constructive manner. This group included three Latina immigrant women whom we employed as project assistants. All had knowledge about and experience with domestic violence in the Latino community as well as connections to local Latino churches. Together we did the initial planning, developed the manuals, planned and conducted three regional train-the-trainer sessions, and collected follow-up information from workshop participants.

In order to reach into immigrant communities with the highest concentration of Latino immigrants, we collaborated with a network of county extension agents. We developed a train-the-trainer model, developed the training manuals (guides), and offered day-long regional trainings to local health professionals identified by the county extension agents. All participants received a guide for trainers and a pastors’ guide. The extension agents and local professionals in turn recruited, trained and provided follow up for the Latino pastors who came to a day-long training and departed with a plan to institute a domestic violence ministry in their communities. They also departed with a Pastors’ Guide, which contained the resources needed to undertake the initiative and contact information of the local trainers.

8. Please describe the process of developing the product, including the ways that community and academic/institutional expertise were integrated in the development of this product.

The manuals were the result of collaboration among three university professors (two in social work and one in human development), three Latina community representatives hired as project assistants, a Latina social worker employed in a Latino mental health agency with strong ties and leadership roles in the immigrant church who volunteered her consultation time and small group of Latino pastors who provided feedback and made suggestion for the content of the manuals. This core group collected information and exchanged ideas with a larger group of Latino pastors from the immigrant community, bilingual social work students and social workers who worked with immigrant families in human service agencies, a child protection worker with extensive connections to the immigrant church community, and a Latina immigrant who worked on grant contracts with various service organizations on projects in the immigrant community to improve the wellbeing of Latino immigrants.

One of the social work professors worked for several years in an anti-poverty program in Mexico in the late 90’s and early 2000’s. When she returned to the U.S., she used that experience as the basis for a series of articles on culturally competent practice with Latino immigrants, including articles on community based domestic violence interventions with immigrant couples and effective group treatment of abusive immigrant men. The other social work professor had practice experience in a rural domestic violence agency and had written a variety of public education materials, some distributed nationally, for audiences with limited literacy skills. The third professor was in a Cooperative Extension Specialist working with county extension agents across the state to address social and health problems of the state’s residents, including Latino immigrants whose population in the state has increased exponentially in the last 10 years.

The Latina mental health consultant was a licensed social worker and was raised in Honduras. In her employment, she provided clinical services for immigrant couples and men who were domestically violent. She also was embedded in the immigrant Evangelical church and served as a church leader in her congregation. The child protection worker lived for several years in Bolivia, spoke fluent Spanish, and was married to a Latino immigrant. She also had extensive contacts with Latino churches and Lay Ministers and was familiar with a wide network across the state. Both of these community social workers served as pastoral consultants to the project and were able to contribute invaluable content on the scriptures and their relevance to pastors’ speaking out against domestic violence, content that was central to creating the pastors’ manual. The contract worker was an immigrant from Uruguay and provided valuable insights about immigrant life and the pressures facing immigrants in the United States. She also served as the project’s translator for the written materials. Latino/bilingual social work students also were involved in the focus group research that served as the foundation of the products and in envisioning of the content of the manuals. Some of these students were employed in mental health and public health settings that served Latino immigrants and were consulted on the project. Dawn Iglesias, project staff, was responsible for organizing the regional trainings and securing and organizing the material on resources listed in the back of each manual. We met with a group of Latino pastors to craft and refine some sections of the trainer and pastors’ manuals . We pre-tested the educational materials with a target audience of Latino Lay Ministers and used their feedback to make revisions.

Faculty, community representatives, consultant and pastors worked together to create the content outlines for the manuals and decide on the substance for each section. This process involved multiple meetings over several months. Members of the team took on the development of specific sections of the manuals according to their expertise. As sections were finished, the group reviewed them and provided additional input. The local resource section of the pastors’ manual was particularly labor intensive as it involved locating resources for 27 counties and calling each one to verify the accuracy of the information to be included.

Once a first draft of the pastors’ manual was completed, we field tested it by sending it to a dozen Latino pastors for them to read and provide feedback. Some mailed back the survey we included. Those who did not, we called. This feedback enabled us to fine-tune the information before presenting it in our first train-the-trainers workshop.

The academics received internal and external funding in the amount of $65,000 to execute the project. We identified 27 counties in our state with the highest concentration of Latino immigrants where we planned to recruit and train local health professionals with the aid of county extension agents. Our plan was to develop the training manuals and to deliver the content of the trainer manual and introduce the pastors’ manual to participants at three separate daylong regional workshops held across the state. Following this training, we planned to encourage professionals from each county represented to form community violence teams in that county to identify, recruit and train Latino pastors in their communities. Each participant who completed the training workshop received a trainer manual and their county domestic violence teams received several copies of the pastors’ manual. The resource section of the pastors’ manual provided a list of state and national resources available to assist pastors in addressing domestic violence in their communities. The pastors’ manual also provided information on local resources in each of the 27 counties covered by the project.

9. Please discuss the significance and impact of your product. In your response, discuss ways your product has added to existing knowledge and benefited the community; ways others may have utilized your product; and any relevant evaluation data about impact, if available. If the impact of the product is not yet known, discuss its potential significance.

The training manuals were the cornerstones of our project. The trainers’ manual was used to equip professionals to form county domestic violence teams composed of members from local social service and health agencies. The goal of the trainers’ manual was to enable these volunteers to approach, recruit, and prepare Latino pastors to respond effectively in different venues as church leaders in the immigrant community.

A total of 108 participants attended three regional train-the-trainer sessions. They represented health departments, community health centers, Departments of Social Services, domestic violence agencies, family care organizations, religious organizations, and the North Carolina Cooperative Extension. During these trainings, we distributed 110 trainers’ manuals, 120 English pastors’ manuals, and 125 Spanish pastors’ manuals. Based on 90 completed workshop evaluations, 77 percent reported an increased comfort level in working with Latino audiences; 87 percent reported learning new strategies for working with Latino audiences; 81 percent indicated increased knowledge of domestic violence; 84 percent reported they had increased their understanding of how to work effectively with the Latino population; and 92 percent stated they had developed good contacts with colleagues for future work.

Project staff conducted follow-up telephone and email surveys to assess participants’ outreach efforts and needs for assistance. Of the 36 total responses, 35 percent had attempted to contact pastors and 18 percent reported plans to initiate pastor trainings at sometime in the future. Seventy-five percent of respondents reported difficulty completing the project; 67 percent of these cited time constraints as the primary problem. Other barriers reported included pastors’ distrust of those outside the Latino community because of aggressive enforcement of immigration laws, some pastors’ reluctance to intervene in family relationships due to conservative gender role beliefs, and difficulties in coordinating pastors’ schedules.

Based on the results above, we decided to work with local trainers to conducting a series of workshops for pastors. These workshops included discussion of the rationale and objectives for the Lighting the Way to a Better Future project, demographics and cultural issues specific to the Latino community, facts on domestic violence, and information on how to work with individuals and families experiencing domestic violence. Vocabulary was tailored to be understandable to individuals of any educational level. Each of these trainings began with an open forum to provide a definition of domestic violence. The trainers described the types of domestic abuse: physical, emotional and psychological, sexual, and economic. Attendees provided everyday examples of each kind of domestic violence. The second part of the workshop offered statistics on domestic violence. It included the incidence of domestic violence among Latinos; prevalence data on domestic violence-related fatalities, domestic violence and pregnancy; and information on the relationship between domestic violence and child abuse. Pastors and other religious leaders in the audience were given the pastors’ manual, in Spanish or English, developed for the project. The trainers provided information on resources for women victims in need of legal assistance and information on how and when to contact Child Protective Services.

During the workshops, pastors displayed their interest in making our program part of their everyday sermons by asking questions and offering opinions. Common questions concerned the types of governmental protections for women and children experiencing domestic violence and the steps churches should take when learning a church member is a victim of abuse. In the workshop evaluations, 57 percent of the 42 respondents indicated they referred members of their congregations for help with domestic violence at least once a year, and 23 percent reported making referrals at least once a month. Prior to our workshop, 48 percent of 43 respondents reported they never gave their congregations information about domestic violence; after our workshop 93 percent of respondents indicated they planned to provide their congregations with information about domestic violence at least monthly.

10. Please describe why you chose the presentation format you did.

The immigrant Latino population in North Carolina is largely dispersed along an I-95 route that cuts through farm land and small towns. It has been estimated that the immigrant Latino population in our state is around 500,000 with the majority of these immigrants undocumented. At the same time, there has been a proliferation of Latino immigrant Protestant evangelical churches in the geographical areas with the highest density of immigrants. We were particularly interested in reaching immigrant pastors in 27 largely rural counties. Utilizing Latino lay pastors as targets and agents of change was one route of access to protecting at-risk immigrant women. A train-the-trainer approach that partnered with local social service and health organizations to educate and prepare pastors to address domestic violence in their churches was designed to reach a population that would have been inaccessible to three university professors located in the state’s Capital. In addition, churches represent a plausible way to reach undocumented immigrants who may feel they have no other place to turn for help with family violence.

Given our approach, the training manuals became the heart and soul of our project. We wanted to provide a tangible product that trainers and pastors could take away from the training. The trainers’ manual is meant to be used repeatedly to train different groups. The pastors’ is a resource for a wide variety of church-based domestic violence-related activities and provides local referral information by county. When our grant funds expired, and we could no longer afford to send out hard copies on request, we were able to continue to meet requests for manuals by sending out electronic copies and posting it online. We are also able update the resources information periodically in the online versions.

11. Please reflect on the strengths and limitations of your product. In what ways did community and academic/institutional collaborators provide feedback and how was such feedback used? Include relevant evaluation data about strengths and limitations if available.

To our knowledge, the pastors’ manual is the only material of its kind. It meets a need we identified in our focus groups and in the literature. It incorporates the perspectives of the pastors who attended our focus groups as well as those with whom we field-tested it. The pastors’ manual provides a unique means to address domestic violence in the Latino community. It offers a way to reach families who will not use formal domestic violence agencies. Written at an 8th grade level in both English and Spanish, it also takes into account language and cultural considerations and offers a religious perspective that pastors can work with comfortably. Additionally the manual contains various practical resources, including definitions of domestic violence, outlines for sermons to educate congregations about domestic violence, guidance on recognizing domestic violence, safe approaches for talking with victims and batterers, an explanation of the nature and importance of confidentiality, and a comprehensive resource directory that lists legal, health, financial and social services and enables pastors to refer families to appropriate resources.

One of the project assistants with extensive contacts in the evangelical immigrant church network provided access to Latino immigrant pastors in a three-county area. They gave us feedback on the pastors’ manual and offered suggestions for improving the trainers’ and pastors’ manuals which we incorporated. Feedback from the pastors who completed the training and used the pastors’ guide indicated that the majority of them found particularly helpful the Biblically-based ideas for creating sermons and the information on talking with abused women, creating men-only activities that supported health family relationships, and resources for referral in their communities.

The trainers’ manual offers a comprehensive approach to what a trainer needs to know in order to gain a culturally relevant understanding of domestic violence in the Latino immigrant community, specifies ways pastors could be helpful in addressing this problem and identifies cultural factors that might affect community leaders’ work with pastors. Our workshops provided a venue for organizing county teams to implement the program with Latino pastors. Participants individually completed an assessment sheet in the trainers’ manual that allowed them to assess and discuss group strengths, barriers to implementing training, and ideas for overcoming barriers. However, trainers do not have to work in teams across agencies in order to undertake pastor trainings.

The manuals we created could be used by a variety of organizations interested in engaging Latino pastors to address domestic violence. The training manuals and the outreach model we developed to introduce the manuals can be integrated into the functions of existing agencies with an interest in this population. Since the manual is the medium used to relay the training content, there is no need for computers or audiovisual equipment. Anecdotal feedback suggests that both manuals might be of interest to a some English-speaking churches who minister to the needs of immigrants and, without the culturally specific references, perhaps to churches serving non-Latino populations.

One major limitation of the manuals is that the resource information in the pastors’ manual is specific to counties in North Carolina. Professionals in other states would have to adapt the resource information to their locations which is a very time and labor intensive effort. Additionally, we used the manuals in conjunction with specific training workshops focused on conveying and giving participants opportunity for dialogue, discussion and exposure to the opinions and views of others in the audience. We encouraged trainers to challenge and encourage the more conservative pastors to expand their views of themselves as constructive instruments in the prevention and intervention of domestic violence in their churches. We also encouraged trainers to confront some tough issues with pastors such as the consequences of their own personal experiences with domestic violence and gender role socialization that could lead them to blame women and not hold men responsible for abuse. We believe that although the pastors’ manuals may be useful without the training, they will have the greatest impact if provided within the context of a training venue and ongoing support for pastors who are willing to use these materials in their churches.

12. Please describe ways that the project resulting in the product involved collaboration that embodied principles of mutual respect, shared work and shared credit. If different, describe ways that the product itself involved collaboration that embodied principles of mutual respect, shared work and shared credit. Have all collaborators on the product been notified of and approved submission of the product to CES4Health.info? If not, why not? Please indicate whether the project resulting in the product was approved by an Institutional Review Board (IRB) and/or community-based review mechanism, if applicable, and provide the name(s) of the IRB/mechanism.

The project was approved by our university’s Institutional Review Board in February 2009.

The creation of the manuals and implementation of the daylong trainings was a concerted effort among community members, pastors, and professors. Project assistants and professors worked with community representatives to select and draft the content of the manuals. They also initiated and organized the day-long trainings with the help of community professionals and county extension agents in the 27 counties covered by the project. Colleagues were mutually dedicated to finding innovative ways to protect Latina immigrants in rural areas and small towns at risk of domestic violence with few avenues for help. Those involved in the development of the manuals worked collaboratively on tasks and shared credit for its development. All collaborators who directly contributed to the development of the manuals are listed on the first page of both manuals. The Latina mental health consultant is recognized as a contributor, as are the Wake County Latino Pastors Association. The project and the product would have not been possible without the collaboration of all of the people listed there.

This list of contributors includes, Malissa de Flores, a project assistant from the social service community who contributed her knowledge and experience in culturally competent practice with Latino immigrant couples and families and the immigrant evangelical church; Sara Vera, a Latina immigrant social work student, who also worked in the immigrant service community; Dawn Iglesias, a project assistant, who complied the list of local, state and national resources in the manuals and who organized the regional trainings for trainers and some of the pastor’s trainings and Laura Price, a Latina immigrant with experience in content development of material on Latino family life, training and translating.

The three professors involved in the project include Tina Hancock, who has published a number of articles on culturally relevant practice in the Latino immigrant community based on her work with working class families in Mexico. Natalie Ames has practice experience in the field of domestic violence and has written a wide array of easy-to-read educational materials, some of which have been published and distributed nationally by the National Cancer Institute. She wrote the final draft of both manuals in collaboration with the translator/trainer and project assistants. The 3rd co-principle investigator, Andrew Behnke, the Human Development Specialist Professor, has extensive experience in working with Latino immigrant families, couples and Latino fathers and speaks Spanish fluently.

All collaborators on the product been notified of and approved submission of the product to CES4Health.info.

Finally, the manuals acknowledge the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation and the North Carolina University Faculty Research and Professional Development Fund for supplying the funds that made the manuals and the project possible.