If I Knew Then What I Know Now: Lessons Learned from the Greenbook Project Directors - Promising Futures

In 1999, the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges published Effective Intervention in Domestic Violence & Child Maltreatment Cases: Guidelines for Policy and Practice(the Greenbook), which offered a set of principles and recommendations to improve outcomes for battered women and their children while at the same time increasing the capacity of systems to hold men who batter accountable for their violence. The Greenbook was designed to guide collaborative  efforts among local child protection agencies, domestic violence advocacy programs, the family or dependency court, and other organizations, to more effectively serve families experiencing domestic violence. Its authors and others recognized the challenges inherent in encouraging these entities to trust and work together, but that doing so had the potential to create greater safety for adult and child victims. The Greenbook Initiative (Initiative) formalized this type of work through deliberate collaboration. This document shares many of the leadership lessons from the perspective of the Greenbook project directors and is one of several publications that document the Greenbook sites’ experience.