Coordinating, developing, and sharing with participants the best practices and tools for building community resilience, using a public health-based approach.
Violent Extremism Education and Resilience (VEER) is a train-the-trainers program, funded by the Department of Homeland Security’s 2023 Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention grant cycle. The goal of the VEER program is to assist and provide tools to communities in cutting edge, video-based inoculation, and methods for preventing radicalization to targeted and terrorist violence. All VEER outcomes center on the goal of building an expanding network of community leaders who have the skills to develop prevention and resilience programs tailored to the needs of their specific, respective communities. This is achieved through three sub-goals.
Coordinating, developing, and sharing with participants the best practices and tools for building community resilience, using a public health-based approach.
Connecting proven-effective offramping and prevention techniques with insight and training into cutting edge new media technologies.
Growing a network of community resilience programs supported by a self-guided online training and resource repository.
We believe that organizations are the best experts when it comes to knowing the challenges that a community faces, along with the needs to meet them. We understand that each community has different needs, their values are unique, and their possible vulnerabilities to violent extremism can change depending on events and circumstances. However, when communities are equipped with tools and assessment capabilities, they can find effective strategies to build resilience against threats.
Targeted violence, hate crimes, political violence, terrorism—these awful events are only the final outcomes of a long process of social failures. The VEER Program is founded on the belief that resilient, inclusive communities can prevent these failures before they start. The VEER Program is here to coordinate, develop, and share the best practices and tools to reduce the conditions that give rise to targeted violence.
We believe that communities where all feel safe and welcome, where all have a stake and a say in the future of their community, are communities that do not produce this kind of violence. This is why VEER draws from such a diverse array of organizations, focusing on everything from election integrity to constructive dialogue, civil rights advocacy, veterans’ interests and more. It’s organizations and movements like these, large and small, from every region of the United States, whose work will reduce those conditions that give rise to violence.
In July 2023, VEER held the Train-the-Trainers convening which introduced participants to the use of cutting edge short-form video technology. This builds on PERIL and partners’ existing experiences in media literacy training and “” interventions, imparting media production skills to participants, along with ways of using the new media landscape to help meet goals.
In January 2024, the launch of the VEER portal will offer self-guided trainings to selected communities and organizations. This learning management system provides guidance on building community resilience, dialogue, the new media landscape, methods, and media production and literacy.
The VEER project is funded through an awarded grant from the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS), Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships (CP3). CP3’s goals are to prevent incidents of targeted violence and terrorism through a whole of society approach, focusing on building resilient communities. Our TVTP/DHS grant number is: EMW-2022-GR-00095
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