Larry Cohen, MSW

Larry Cohen, MSW, is founder and Executive Director of Prevention Institute, a non-profit national center dedicated to improving community health and well-being by building momentum for effective primary prevention. He has created tools and frameworks to help communities develop effective prevention strategy, including the Spectrum of Prevention, which has been used nationally in numerous prevention initiatives, including founding the prevention program in Contra Costa County now known as Community Wellness and Prevention.  His work is characterized by the ability to build on the successes of a variety of seemingly unrelated fields – from increasing safety belt use to banning lead in paint – and apply them to new challenges, including gender-related violence.

Mr. Cohen has helped to define violence as a preventable public health issue and developed one of the nation's first courses on violence prevention at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health.  His recent writings on gender violence include Poised for Prevention: Advancing Promising Approaches to Primary Prevention of Intimate Partner Violence, written for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Sexual Violence and the Spectrum of Prevention: Towards A Community Solution, published by the NSVRC. Through the California Coalition Against Sexual Assault, he works to develop and facilitate Prevention Connection, a series of web conferences and online dialogues that build the capacity of local, state, national, and tribal agencies and organizations to develop, implement, and evaluate effective initiatives for preventing violence against women.  Mr. Cohen is also the co-editor of Prevention is Primary: Strategies for Community Wellbeing, a recently published academic text with a unique focus on prevention.