About the Center for Childhood Safety and Wellbeing
The Center for Childhood Safety and Wellbeing (CSAW) is a research and outreach center in the University of Oregon College of Education focused on preventing childhood violence and strengthening the conditions that support safety and wellbeing. We work alongside communities, youth, survivors, families, schools, organizations, and public systems to better understand what makes violence less likely and turn what we learn into practical action.
As a university center, we bring research, evaluation, and sustained learning capacity to this work while recognizing that communities and people with lived experience hold knowledge essential to prevention. Our work brings these different forms of knowledge together to strengthen prevention over time.
Mission
Collaborating with Oregon communities, youth, families, and traditionally excluded persons to prevent violence and promote healing, belonging, and child and youth wellbeing.
Vision
Every Oregon child/youth experiences safety, belonging, and connection, every family has the support and resources they need, and community members routinely act to advance this vision.
What We Believe
Childhood violence is preventable.
Prevention means creating conditions where children, families, and communities can thrive.
Communities hold knowledge essential to prevention.
Lived experience is expertise. Youth and survivors bring essential knowledge to understanding childhood violence and shaping approaches to prevention.
Learning should lead to action. Research and evaluation are most useful when what we learn helps communities strengthen prevention in practice.
In practice, community experience shapes the questions we ask, research informs prevention, and what we learn together helps strengthen approaches over time.
Explore how this work takes shape through Research & Evaluation, Prevention & Advocacy, and Community Engagement.
What We Mean by Childhood Violence
Childhood violence takes many forms, and not all of them are captured by traditional definitions of child abuse and neglect.
At CSAW, our understanding of childhood violence includes abuse, neglect, exposure to intimate partner violence, and identity-based harm, including bullying, harassment, and violence related to a young person's identity or how others perceive them.
This broader definition reflects what we've learned from research, young people, survivors, and community partners: experiences of violence can overlap, and the conditions that make children vulnerable to harm often extend across relationships, institutions, and communities.
How we define violence shapes what we measure, whose experiences we recognize, and what we work to prevent.
By looking across these experiences, CSAW can ask more complete questions about childhood safety and wellbeing and identify opportunities to strengthen the conditions that make violence less likely.
Explore the definitions and key concepts that guide our work →
Our Roots
CSAW’s story began in 2011, when 225 Lane County residents came together around a question: What would it take to move from responding to child abuse after harm occurs toward preventing it?
Those conversations helped launch the 90by30 Initiative and, a year later, the university center that would become CSAW.
In the years that followed, thousands of community members helped shape locally informed prevention strategies. Research and evaluation helped us learn from what happened in practice. OCAPS created new ways to learn directly from young people. And our central prevention question evolved from asking which programs to implement toward understanding which conditions communities can deliberately strengthen to make violence less likely.
That history continues to shape how CSAW works today.
Who We Are Today
CSAW brings together the sustained capacity of a public research university with the knowledge, experience, leadership, and relationships of communities.
Our team includes researchers, prevention practitioners, evaluators, educators, and community-engaged professionals. We work alongside youth, survivors, families, schools, community organizations, public agencies, and prevention partners to learn what strengthens childhood safety and wellbeing—and put that learning into practice.
After nearly 15 years of research, implementation, evaluation, and community partnership, we are bringing what we have learned together through our Promotive Action Plan and Theory of Change. Our next chapter is focused on building and testing the infrastructure communities need to sustain prevention over time, learning what happens when those capacities work together, and translating that learning for other communities.
The University of Oregon is an important home for this next phase. CSAW contributes directly to Oregon Rising’s signature scholarship in Youth Behavioral and Mental Health, bringing together prevention, research, community partnership, implementation, and measurement to strengthen the conditions that support young people’s safety and wellbeing. As a public research university, UO also provides the sustained capacity to build knowledge over time, connect disciplines, prepare future prevention professionals and researchers, and translate what is learned in Oregon into approaches that can benefit communities more broadly.
Explore our next chapter → Coming soon
