Hold Team Meetings . Monitor and Evaluate Your Efforts . Sustain Your SART . Know Your Team . Critical Issues
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Build Your SART
We can never make those who have been victimized whole again, but we can provide services to help them move forward.
—John W. Gillis, Former OVC Director, 2003
How SARTs decide to organize and work together depends on the individuals, organizations, and agencies invited to participate and the resources available at local, regional, state, territory, tribal, or institutional levels. The levels of partnership and formality vary depending on the economic, political, and historic structures within jurisdictions. However, SARTs generally share a common purpose—to provide comprehensive and specialized services, ensure continuity of care for victims, enhance evidence collection, and increase public safety.
For the purposes of this toolkit, cooperation, coordination, and collaboration are all acknowledged as avenues to forming SARTs. Collaboration, however, usually provides the most comprehensive model for responding to sexual violence. For this reason, this section emphasizes ways to build SARTs as a collaborative response.
Cooperation occurs when multidisciplinary agencies informally exchange information, as needs arise.
Coordination occurs when multidisciplinary agencies work together with an understanding that their missions are compatible.
Collaboration occurs when multidisciplinary agencies commit to share resources, refer victims for services, coordinate or respond to sexual violence as a team, and monitor and evaluate interagency responses through quality assurance mechanisms.
Read on to learn how to—
- Form a planning team.
- Establish SART leadership.
- Find a SART coordinator.
- Define the SART's jurisdiction.
- Assess community readiness.
- Identify opportunities for collaboration.
- Develop budgetary resources.
- Decide on core membership.
- Schedule a planning meeting.
- Expand SART membership.
