End Domestic Abuse Wisconsin’s core philosophy of a Coordinated Community Response to domestic violence is that domestic violence is a community issue that requires engagement from the entire community to address.

Since their inception in Wisconsin in the mid-1980s, Coordinated Community Response (CCR) teams have brought together key players in community systems, usually on a county-wide basis, to develop strategies and procedures aimed at strengthening our community’s and systems’ response to domestic violence and sexual assault.

Although many CCR teams begin their coordination efforts with the criminal process, this system represents only one piece of the larger community. Because the legal system is not a support all victims choose to engage, an effective CCR team will include members from schools, mental health and other healthcare agencies, neighborhood centers, faith communities, county extension agencies, culturally-specific organizations, and many other groups. CCR must go beyond the legal system to truly create a wide network of support for victims, which is especially important for communities of color, people with disabilities, older adults, and other survivors from marginalized communities.

Each CCR team creates its own specific goals, but most CCRs have goals around the following key areas:

• Ensuring a victim-centered response to violence and equitable access to community resources
• Holding offenders accountable
• Ensuring all communities, including marginalized populations, affected by domestic violence have a voice and access to culturally appropriate responses
• Promoting a collective position that domestic violence is a community problem, which means the community has a responsibility to help prevent it